Amazon Commerce Platform (1994)

Class card for Amazon.com Inc. as a commerce-platform machine — the canonical DM-Day flywheel instance that displaced catalog retail (Sears, Sears Roebuck mail-order legacy) via continuous selection-expansion and price-compression, not by formal succession. Founded July 1994 in Bellevue WA as Cadabra by Jeff Bezos; renamed to Amazon.com and launched as books-only retailer July 1995; IPO May 1997 (~$0.075/share split-adjusted). The machine's operational grammar is the Bezos flywheel (more selection → more customers → more 3P sellers → lower costs → lower prices → more selection). By 2026 the platform hosts 350M+ SKUs, >200M Prime members globally, ~60% of GMV from 3P sellers, ~$50B+/yr advertising revenue, and owns the dominant US robotics-warehouse network via Amazon Robotics (Kiva acquisition 2012). AWS (DM-11) is an owned-by subsidiary machine with its own card — not conflated here. Machine_type: incorporeal (marketplace + Prime data substrate is the load-bearing operational grammar; warehouses are substrate, not the machine itself). Heavy_or_light: heavy_light_asymmetric (fulfillment + AWS infra are heavy; marketplace platform layer is light and highly replicable). Motor: flywheel (two-sided marketplace with self-amplifying selection↔price↔seller↔customer loop). DM-Day late_modernity current: Amazon in 2026 exhibits energetic-zombie pathology — massive capital intensity (capex $60B+/yr), declining genuine product innovation, rent-extraction dominance on 3P-seller economics (commission rates ~15-45%), antitrust exposure (FTC v. Amazon 2023, EU DMA 2024). Artifact_type_in_2026: live. Standalone card (Batch 1); Sears→Amazon crypto_continuation/substitution lineage deferred to Batch 2 once machine:sears-roebuck-mail-order-mm is on disk. [STUB] Amazon Air + Freight last-mile coverage metrics not independently verified.