Quote:
Originally Posted by fjtorres
His wife likes him. 
To be big time successful in business you need to be able to switch from your normal private persona to a ruthless executive persona. Big business isn't a place for touchie-feelie nice guys.
The trick is knowing when to switch hats.
Of course, some guys never switch or don't have a nice guy side.
Most executive interviews are promotional efforts to highlight a specific product or initiative. This one is more about countering bad press than salesmanship. That's why there was all the talk about critics with agendas.
But buried in between the "selling Mr Bezos" are a few reminders of the true history of Amazon. Like the fact that the company was built off one insight: Ingram had a catalog of every book in print, over 3 million titles, yet no physical store could stock even ten percent. More, Ingram could deliver those books within a day or two yet no bookstore offered better than multi-week waits on "special orders". Presumably because they would rather move their in-store inventory than act as a mail-order front.
Anybody could do what he did, if only they thought of it.
In fact, Amazon wasn't the only one who did it.
Buy.com and B&N did it, too, to name just two.
Amazon just did it better.
Note that in the anecdote about packing tables, Bezos points out that most of his earliest employees were techie coders. That might have a bit to do with their quick and fast success. To sell online you need the best website you can possibly build, yet none of their competitors have done that, much less build one better than Amazon.
(Mostly irrelevant anecdote: yesterday I went to WalMart.com looking for a specific model of a product. The search engine coughed up three links as in stock. All three led to the exact same third party vendor and the same SKU. Click on one. Listed as in stock. Put it in cart. Go to cart to see what the tax and shipping charge is. I'm logged in to my account. Still need to enter the zip code. And: Oh, sorry. It's not really in stock. No idea when it will be. Ten minutes wasted. I've bought stuff from them but it is always a last resort and it is always a pain.)
It's not as if Amazon is even close to perfect. Anybody here can easily name three ways they could improve book discovery and sales using techniques music and video distributors use. But nobody else uses them either.
Big business is a tough activity to succeed in, but a lot of these big business successes are simply gifted with singularly inept competitors. They're the one-eyed in the land of the blind. |
I agree with much of these. Amazon is a bit like Democracy, i.e. it's the worst, except for all the others.
While I wouldn't particular want to work for him, I give him a lot of credit for having a vision and holding the course of building up the company rather than worry about stock prices and bottom lines.
I would be a lot happier on the ebook front if Amazon had at least one robust competitor who forced Amazon to continue to innovate and improves with regards to ebooks. That lack of competition is why we haven't seen meaningful improvement over the last decade, but that's hardly Amazon's fault.