I was in the Kindle org when it was blowing up at Amazon. Started when there were a few dozen people in Seattle working on it, ended when there were a few thous

I was in the Kindle org when it was blowing up at Amazon. Started when there were a few dozen people in Seattle working on it, ended when there were a few thousand. They're right that it could've been more. Back in the early days, after the launch of the second version, many people internally saw this. If this works for books, it should work for magazines! Newspapers! Websites! Crosswords! Apps of all sorts! Social networks! The possibilities were endless. Teams scaled up, rapid category expansion ensued, Amazon started grappling for dominance in eBooks and all these other categories. Then the iPad came out. I remember going with my boss to the Apple Store on launch day and buying one; the future of the Kindle felt pretty clear. Our product was stuck with a shitty general-purpose display technology and a clunky SDK not suited to external developers. Then, Android launched. The writing was on the wall. eInk was going to be niche, the Kindle group pivoted to the Fire, we all know how that turned out. The failure of Kindle as a better, more general purpose device is a great lesson in business strategy. Thousands of smart engineers and product people were dedicated to making it the next big computing device, but in the end they failed to build a platform, and the platform players ended up on top. They're still trying to get over this failure with the Alexa series of products, we'll see if they succeed.