Jeff Bezos on the Future of Amazon.com | Hacker News Reader

Jeff Bezos on the Future of Amazon.com

smartmoney.com

28 pointsatestu12 comments

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"Bezos: We are responding to customer needs.

SM: No one asked for the Kindle."

What's wrong with this guy (the interviewer)?

Imagine Bezos answering that question with the following quote:

If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said, "Faster horses." -- Henry Ford

The interviewer is an asshole,

"Your handlers said I could only talk to you about Kindle but that you wouldn't give specifics on its sales. That sounds paranoid."

"Amazon has about 6 percent of all U.S. sales online. That's huge. Why muck it up with all the other businesses you've added, like manufacturing [the Kindle] and your new customer-service software?"

Totally unprofessional and if I were the editor I would be embarrassed to publish this piece of shit. Just publishing Bezos's answers would be better than seeing the way SmartMoney's interview asked the questions.

Bezos took it in stride, he seemed to remain calm despite the idiotic line of inquiry.

I totally disagree. This was a smart interviewer setting the tone early - one, the interviewer appealed to Bezos' ego to get the PR handler's rules dismissed (win - Jeff answered questions about AWS) and made it clear that PR answers wouldn't be acceptable (fail - Jeff was remarkably on message).

Interviewers are supposed to get interesting answers out of their subjects. Being combative and having a point of view are tactical decisions, not a sign of being unprofessional.

(As an aside, Sarah Lacy's fawning over Zuck was a tactic that failed. It also might have worked if it wasn't up on stage in front of everyone. Different tactics work for different interviewers and different subjects in different settings and times.)

Bezos is a remarkably good PR bot, his speech at Startup School last year was a 30 minute long worthy PR spiel for AWS and probably the least informative talk ever given at Startup School.

"... I totally disagree. This was a smart interviewer setting the tone early ..."

Nice observations on 'people hacks' sachinag. These are not things you can learn from 'books'. Where did you learn them? Negotiating in market places?

"We launched our Web services two years ago; it's the equivalent of creating an electric grid, but for computing. Recently, I went to Luxembourg and visited a 300-year-old brewery. It had this gigantic relic of a generator from when it had to make its own electricity. As soon as they could buy off-grid, they did. Making their own electricity didn't make their beer taste better. It's the same for running your own data center."

Awesome analogy. I don't understand why so many people want to host their own services. Stick to your core business.

Many businesses have their own photocopiers, fax machines, and PBXs, do their own accounting, maintain their own supplier lists, provide support to their own customers when they have problems, and pay their own employees, even though you can outsource each of these services. Sometimes the problems of outsourcing a business function are greater than the benefits of the enhanced specialization.

For several years now, the vast majority of companies that have an internet connection have had some of their internet-connected computers inside their own companies, and others somewhere else, like a colocation center. Even though AWS is pretty awesome, I don't expect that to change anytime soon; the balance will shift back and forth according to things like available technology, legal liability, experienced quality of service, and so on.

Depends on when providing a web service with an SLA is your core competency. I'd readily use S3/EC2 for running Hadoop/doing backups/rapid prototyping (and use a CDN for static hosting) -- but if your core competency is providing a web service with an SLA* you want to control as much of the stack involved in that process as possible.

Of courses in these cases you'd want to outsource as much of the lower-level work as possible (e.g. having a third party company rack and stack and provide you with a serial console).

* Not all web applications require an SLA, early adopter consumer applications, e.g. Twitter would be an obvious example.

Worth reading for this single phrase: "Our approach is not to set a goal. Our approach has been to create the best physical model and let customers choose".

The interviewer kept trying to get him to admit he was spreading himself thin. What gives?

This is a chaotic and cynical interview.

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