But the thread was on dpr closure theory. What’s your theories? I agree with Serge, someone randomly decided, they don’t really know. It’s actually quite crazy.
Before I retired, I was an auditor working on a number of large US corporations. Many of them own a number of businesses, subsidiaries, etc.. From time to time, they look at these businesses and decide if they are still a fit with where the corporation wants to go. If they are profitable then they might look to sell them. If they aren't profitable or marginally so then they might just close them.
So my closure theory is that Amazon looked at DPreview and decided it wasn't a fit with their strategic direction and wasn't profitable enough to be sold or bought out by its own management. So they decided to close it. Maybe they even made a loss on the closure which they can write off against tax.
There is probably a group somewhere in Amazon that is in charge of acquisitions and divestitures (most large corporations have them). That group will have made the proposal to someone in senior management who looked at the numbers in the proposal and rubber-stamped the decision. In that sense, I don't think it was random but rather it was standard procedure.