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I'm amazed by Amazon. Some of their moves follow a playbook. Books -> Clothes -> Diapers. A non-technical CEO turning the company into an API machine that ou

I'm amazed by Amazon. Some of their moves follow a playbook. Books -> Clothes -> Diapers. A non-technical CEO turning the company into an API machine that outsources it's own technology... Every textbook would say crazy, but he's on to something. Makes one wonder about the drones.

donflamenco 12y ago
Bezos graduated with a CS degree from Princeton. I wouldn't call that non-technical. He is extremely sharp.
- mathattack 12y ago
  Monstorously smart. I consider him one of the top CEOs of all time because he succeeds on so many levels: Business design, technology enablement, hiring, surviving market ups and downs, investor relations... I had (wrongly) assumed he was a business person first since he had most recently worked at Bankers Trust and DE Shaw. Thank you for the clarification. This explains his insights that would drive AWS.
  - michaeldhopkins 12y ago
    DE Shaw is a quant firm and tends to hire out of STEM fields, not arts like business.
    - mathattack 12y ago
      Yes. I should have caught this.
  - deleted 12y ago
    [deleted]
coldtea 12y ago
>I'm amazed by Amazon I, on the other hand, am underwhelmed. Their AWS services is a pretty cool tech and business. But as for their other stuff: 1) Their core business (the store) barely makes any profit. Their profit margins are razor-thin, and until recently operated at a loss IIRC. 2) Their ebooks and music store are ho-hum. 3) Their hardwares, Kindles (Fire and plain) are simply loss leaders for content sales. Which (1) is not that profitable in itself anyway. Not that difficult to sell stuff like readers and tablets at a cost or slight loss. Anything else I forget about?
- jib 12y ago
  That's the genius though. They are the ultimate Walmart, and that is one of the best things to be. Even better, they are Walmart with the option to expand into anything, because they don't have the stigma of being cheap. They can sell luxury goods (at small margins), highly complex technical solutions (at small margins) etc etc. What Amazon have managed to do is essentially to brand a bunch of things that were highly commoditized before. The potential in that is amazing, and almost scary.
- aquadrop 12y ago
  I think all that things are considered investment in the future by Bezos. Amazon will probably eclipse Apple, Microsoft, Google etc in 5-10 years.
  - coldtea 12y ago
    Or it will be the same as it is now -- because I don't think there's any magical path to make a low-margin, comoditized, operating at almost break even business in a highly profitable one.
- ubob 12y ago
  Amazon MWS, their horrible piece of an API. If I were to give someone an example of a bad API it would be Amazon MWS, because it has everything: -XML only (which is often strucured in the most obscure ways, and inconsistent through the API) -shared reqeust throttling across all authorized applications (which turns the API from "barely useful" to "I can be lucky if I get a valid response") -inconsistent across all marketplaces (of course I can't use the "fullfilmentLatency" attribute on the US-marketplace like in the rest of the world) -unreliable (yeah Amazon, just ignore the list of prices I just sent you and mark them as processed, I am used to it) That and many more things(e.g. hiding competitors in the responses) makes the API so useless that many people resort to just scraping the Amazon pages. An API that is so bad that nobody uses it is almost as bad as none at all. I'm sorry, I didn't mean to rage but seeing that Amazon treats 3rd party developers and merchants like shit while doing everything to make the customers happy always makes my blood boil.
- mistermann 12y ago

donflamenco 12y ago

Bezos graduated with a CS degree from Princeton. I wouldn't call that non-technical. He is extremely sharp.

mathattack 12y ago
Monstorously smart. I consider him one of the top CEOs of all time because he succeeds on so many levels: Business design, technology enablement, hiring, surviving market ups and downs, investor relations... I had (wrongly) assumed he was a business person first since he had most recently worked at Bankers Trust and DE Shaw. Thank you for the clarification. This explains his insights that would drive AWS.
- michaeldhopkins 12y ago
  DE Shaw is a quant firm and tends to hire out of STEM fields, not arts like business.
  - mathattack 12y ago
    Yes. I should have caught this.
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]

coldtea 12y ago

>I'm amazed by Amazon I, on the other hand, am underwhelmed. Their AWS services is a pretty cool tech and business. But as for their other stuff: 1) Their core business (the store) barely makes any profit. Their profit margins are razor-thin, and until recently operated at a loss IIRC. 2) Their ebooks and music store are ho-hum. 3) Their hardwares, Kindles (Fire and plain) are simply loss leaders for content sales. Which (1) is not that profitable in itself anyway. Not that difficult to sell stuff like readers and tablets at a cost or slight loss. Anything else I forget about?

jib 12y ago
That's the genius though. They are the ultimate Walmart, and that is one of the best things to be. Even better, they are Walmart with the option to expand into anything, because they don't have the stigma of being cheap. They can sell luxury goods (at small margins), highly complex technical solutions (at small margins) etc etc. What Amazon have managed to do is essentially to brand a bunch of things that were highly commoditized before. The potential in that is amazing, and almost scary.
aquadrop 12y ago
I think all that things are considered investment in the future by Bezos. Amazon will probably eclipse Apple, Microsoft, Google etc in 5-10 years.
- coldtea 12y ago
  Or it will be the same as it is now -- because I don't think there's any magical path to make a low-margin, comoditized, operating at almost break even business in a highly profitable one.
ubob 12y ago
Amazon MWS, their horrible piece of an API. If I were to give someone an example of a bad API it would be Amazon MWS, because it has everything: -XML only (which is often strucured in the most obscure ways, and inconsistent through the API) -shared reqeust throttling across all authorized applications (which turns the API from "barely useful" to "I can be lucky if I get a valid response") -inconsistent across all marketplaces (of course I can't use the "fullfilmentLatency" attribute on the US-marketplace like in the rest of the world) -unreliable (yeah Amazon, just ignore the list of prices I just sent you and mark them as processed, I am used to it) That and many more things(e.g. hiding competitors in the responses) makes the API so useless that many people resort to just scraping the Amazon pages. An API that is so bad that nobody uses it is almost as bad as none at all. I'm sorry, I didn't mean to rage but seeing that Amazon treats 3rd party developers and merchants like shit while doing everything to make the customers happy always makes my blood boil.
mistermann 12y ago