[brador]

Fog creek is nice, but you're working on small localized projects compared to Amazons scale and breadth.

Amazon employees are pushed hard, and that's their key to shipping innovation.

Look at Googles cuddle farm - Lots of innovation that rarely ships and no risk taking.

How about Apple - Constrained innovation, low risk, Once a year shipping.

And there's a hundred other CEOs and companies that just don't come close. From an investor standpoint, Bezos is the gold standard of post-IPO CEO. Risk taking, innovation, shipping. The dude's on point.

He understands risk taking is the key because returns on hits are 10-1000x your investment. Look at EC2. That can cover the cost of 1000 "firephone" style project failures. But you gotta get it out of R&D and into the market. You need to ship.

And he gets that.

[Daishiman]

Under those metrics, almost all of Amazon's products have been flops and none are not any way similar to the cash cows that Google and Apple have managed to develop and maintain without succumbing to competitors.

I don't think that having to run rust to stay in place the way Amazon does is a sustainable business strategy.

[brador]

As an investor I'm not looking for Thiels "sustainable business strategy", I want growth. New products, new markets, pushing the envelope.

And that comes from taking risks,, shipping, and dealing with failures. Google and Apple are simply not doing that in a meaningful way, and their share price reflects that.

[uxcn]

I'm not sure I agree with this about Amazon, but some of it may just be strategy opinion differences. Apple and Google both have higher capitalizations, but more importantly they operate at growing profits as opposed to a loss. Google's share price is also substantially higher than Amazon's.

Bezos has definitely made some good decisions, but I think attributing too much to one person (correct or incorrect) is a bit of a problem. Either the company fails without that person, or the perception is that the company can't succeed without that person.

Regardless, my personal opinion on Amazon's overall retail strategy and execution is honestly pretty bad.