Doug McMillan, you know, worked at Walmart very long time. Early 2014, he becomes CEO. And at some

point early in his tenure, he does the Silicon Valley pilgrimage. One of his key stops was Google

and meeting with Larry Page and a few others. Larry basically makes the case to Doug. You guys, you know, you want to do this digital transformation thing.

You really don't have a shot unless you partner with Google, essentially.

It just did not go over well with him.

And my reporting showed that it did have a real outcome on both companies, businesses,

and how they thought about each other for a few years, at least.

It's also very good for Microsoft because Walmart wasn't about to take its cloud business to

AWS, Amazon Web Services. And you've seen Microsoft and Walmart get pretty close over the years.

Absolutely.

Thank you. I've seen Microsoft and Walmart get pretty close over the years. Absolutely.

Welcome to Geekwire. I'm Geekwire co-founder Todd Bishop.

That anecdote about Google and Walmart in the opener

is one of the revelations in the new book,

Winner Sells All, Amazon, Walmart, and The Battle for Our Wallets,

by my guest, Jason Del Rey, the business journalists who developed a reputation for scoops

and smart reporting about the online retail industry as a reporter for more than a decade at

Recode and Vox Media. Jason, thanks for joining me. Hey, really appreciate it. Of course, I followed

your reporting for many years. And I got to say, the structure of this book, comparing Walmart

to Amazon in a long form really focused the Amazon story for me because it focused it on its core

business. And my first thought as I got into the book was it made me wonder if this general construct

might be a good way for Amazon to focus its business because like Project Kuiper wasn't

...