> When Bezos insisted that the original 2007 Kindle include a cellular connection so customers could download and access e-books from anywhere, people thought the idea was an exorbitant flourish (...) When Bezos encouraged a free-shipping initiative, executives pushed back, nervous about its impact on earnings. (...) So when it came to the Fire Phone, says one former product lead, "Yes, there was heated debate about whether it was heading in the right direction. But at a certain point, you just think, ‘Well, this guy has been right so many times before.’"

It must be extremely hard/impossible to challenge Jeff Bezos when you're... well when you're not him.

However, the examples given here of Jeff being right, are about features that benefit customers (at a cost that some people thought was too high).

But the problem with the 3-D functionality wasn't that it was costing the company too much. It was that nobody could figure out how it would be useful -- at any cost for Amazon, or the customer.

I remember the videos promoting the Fire phone with random people saying "wow"... they reminded me of the Windows Vista videos, with random people looking out their window and staring at deer in the morning sun.

If you have to pay actors to say "wow" in a video maybe there's a problem.