Call me a sceptic but a hail-mary acquisition of this kind is not going to save Walmart.<p>Amazon is built through and through as a tech company. The people running it all have tech backgrounds so they're all able to get behind the Bezos vision of automation and scale trumping all.<p>To give you an idea of how savvy the management of Amazon are, I heard rumours that Diego Piacentini (Bezos' lieutenant managing the retail business) was known to roll out his own SQL queries. My own head of the team, who was a more conventional "retail guy", barely knew how to use excel and had chiefly gotten to where he was by politics and tenureship, despite being younger than Diego. Whether it is true or not, it gives an idea of the mindset and skillset valued at the top of Amazon.<p>Now I'm almost certainly biased given that I've worked for Amazon and not for Walmart, but I'd be willing to bet that Walmart has more of the latter "old school" types than CS folks looking to solve new fields. And to me, that says that the odds are tipped against this integration being successful as catching up with a tech company would require an overhaul of Walmarts entire infrastructure and culture. Not to mention that Walmart are at the mercy of their shareholders, whilst Bezos is still majority shareholder.