Quotes About Amazon

Amazon executives were going to have to substitute artifice and improvisation for truly comprehensive selection.

Bezos and other startup founders were reacting to lessons from previous technology giants. Microsoft took a top-down management approach with layers of middle managers, a system that ended up slowing decisions and stifling innovation. Looking at the muffled and unhappy hierarchy of the software giant across Lake Washington, Amazon executives saw a neon sign warning them exactly what to avoid.

In the spring of 2011, Amazon was valued at $80 billion. Buoyed by the rise of his stock holdings, the forty-seven-year-old Bezos was the thirtieth richest person in the world, with an $18.1 billion net worth.

Unlike brick-and-mortar retailers, whose inventories were spread out across hundreds or thousands of stores around the country, Amazon had one website and, at that time, a single warehouse and inventory. Amazon's ratio of fixed costs to revenue was considerably more favorable than that of its offline competitors

Unlike traditional retailers, Amazon returned few unsold books, often less than 5 percent. The big book chains regularly returned 40 percent of all the books they acquired from publishers, for full refunds,

When you have fit yourself snugly into Jeff Bezos's worldview and then evaluated both the successes and failures of Amazon over the past two decades, the future of the company becomes easy to predict. The answer to almost every conceivable question is yes.

While other dot-coms merged or perished, Amazon survived through a combination of conviction, improvisation, and luck.

Amazon customers who joined Prime doubled, on average, their spending on the site, according to a person familiar with the company's internal finances at the time. A Prime member was like a shopper who walked into a Costco warehouse for a case of beer and walked out with the beer plus an armful of DVDs, a nine-pound smoked ham, and a flat-screen television.

relentless.com takes you to amazon

Amazon was a family affair in another way. MacKenzie, an aspiring novelist,

by reducing the friction of online buying even marginally, amazon could reap additional millions in revenue while simultaneously digging a protective moat around its business and hobbling its rivals

word of mouth could deliver customers to amazon. he wanted to funnel the saved marketing dollars into improving the customer experience and accelerating the flywheel

He says Bezos takes a red pen to press releases, product descriptions, speeches, and shareholder letters, crossing out anything that does not speak simply and positively to customers.

In the spring of 1999, Wall Street's euphoria seemed to diminish. The financial weekly Barron's published a seminal article entitled "Amazon.bomb" that declared, "Investors are beginning to realize that this storybook stock has problems.

amazon customers who joined prime doubled, on average, their spending on the site

Amazon tried to combat employee delinquency by using a point system to track how workers performed their jobs. Arriving late cost an employee half a point; failing to show up altogether was three points. Even calling in sick cost a point. An employee who collected six such demerits was let go.

George instead reorganized Alexa around the Amazonian ideal of fast-moving "two pizza" teams, each devoted to a specific Alexa domain, like music, weather, lighting, thermostats, video devices, and so on. Each team was run by a so-called "single-threaded leader" who had ultimate control and absolute accountability over their success or failure. (The phrase comes from computer science terminology; a single-threaded program executes one command at a time.)

There are lots of lessons to learn from Amazon. Never stop innovating or questioning the fundamentals of your business. Disrupt yourself before others do. Continually motivate employees so that they never get too complacent - see Yahoo, AOL and many other Internet companies for evidence of what happens when they do.

I am here to tell you, TV is not dead. Rather, it is constantly evolving as we are. My view is that we are in the next Golden Age of content. If AOL, Google, Netflix, Amazon, and Yahoo felt TV was dying, they would not be so eager to play in our sandbox. It is, after all, TV content that's driving their business.

Anybody who ever left Microsoft to Amazon, we could count on them coming back within a year or two, because it's not a great place to work to do innovative stuff as an engineer.

We've had three big ideas at Amazon that we've stuck with for 18 years, and they're the reason we're successful: Put the customer first. Invent. And be patient.

I've got a new pair of trainers. That's the only difference in my life since I started working for Amazon.

Amazon and Snap both have stories that are compelling for many investors: Amazon has transformed retailing and is destined to dominate it. Snap is reinventing communication, at least for millennials and those even younger.

I am beyond excited to share 'Transparent' with the world through Amazon. They've been so supportive through this incredible process.