Posts by BenM

> He didn't understand that the retail operation runs on top of the cloud services...

I pretty sure they would be aware of this, however it doesn't mean this needs to be the case. If the companies split they would just purchase cloud capacity as any other customer would.

> ...and the cloud services started as excess capacity the retail bits didn't need.

No it didn't, this is a common myth.

> You can't really split them.

Of course you can. Just like plenty of other businesses run sites on AWS I am sure Amazon.com could continue to run on AWS if the companies split.

> If the result is close enough that the contents of a missing or suspicious box could affect the outcome then the only proper thing to do is declare the election void and hold it again.

The problem with that is that for some poor workers, they may not have the ability to get to the voting booths again. Perhaps they had to drop a shift so they could vote and can't afford to do that again. A recount is preferable because a new vote could effectively disenfranchise particular segments of the population.

Re: They still made a lot of money!

> "A very successful company has reported earnings under what analysts predicted. Result, a ridicolous dumping of shares." [SIC]

But that's not what happened. This was Citrix not meeting their *own* guidance, not what some outside analyst was predicting. They originally said "we're predicting earnings between $730 to 740 million" but have now come back and said "sorry it's actually going to be between $710 to 712 million".