[equestria]

I don't know. The reality is just that most business ideas don't pan out. There were hundreds of well-funded efforts to build online retailers before Amazon happened. If you're well-off, it's obviously easier to try and try again, but you're still likely to fail.

I think the article is right in that if you don't have a clear business idea ("we're building a platform"), the odds are even worse. Except when they aren't, because in some niches, you actually have customers who want a platform. Cloud computing is an obvious example. It's just not the general case for consumer stuff.

[PaulDavisThe1st]

> There were hundreds of well-funded efforts to build online retailers before Amazon happened

Maybe hundreds. Maybe not. We (the initial amzn team of bezos, myself and shel kaphan) were certainly not looking at any others that I recall besides bookstacks who had a telnet-based online bookstore.

I think people overlook the role of luck here. Bezos was simultaneously very smart but also incredibly lucky to be "the guy who was doing books on the web". It really was the ideal product for the first large scale online retail, and Bezos brought a lot of imagination and energy to the effort. But if it had not have been him, it would have been someone else, who likely would have been more or less as successful.

Personally, I think that Bezos' relentless focus on customer service was the biggest factor in amzn's early success, combined with his near-insane quality standards for the people he was willing to hire.

[kragen]

What was the "lucky" part? The article claims that Bezos learned that web usage was growing 2300% a year (public knowledge), decided to sell stuff on the web, made a list of 20 potential products, and decided that books were the one where an online store could best compete. Is that wrong? It makes it sound like the particular way Bezos was lucky was by happening to be smart, smarter than the rest of us who were paying attention to what was going on. But it sounds like you're saying there was some other form of luck involved. What was it?

[PaulDavisThe1st]

What I mean by luck is that I don't think that Bezos (or the rest of us) had any special qualifications or experiences that meant that we were the only ones who could have made amzn work. He was lucky in that his situation at D.E. Shaw allowed him to do the market research that led him to the book store concept (notably after Shaw rejected it). He wasn't smarter than the rest of us. Had Shaw not asked him to research possible online opportunities, he may never have come up with the concept at all. And it wasn't Shaw either, given that he turned down most of the ideas Bezos presented, most of which went on to become pretty huge.

[kragen]

I see! So the luck was in happening to be paying attention to the right things, and happening to bet on them even though other equally smart people (like David Shaw) decided not to, given the same information? Thank you for explaining.

[immibis]

"Luck is when preparation meets opportunity." You need both, and a good dice roll as well.

[toast0]

> Except when they aren't, because in some niches, you actually have customers who want a platform. Cloud computing is an obvious example. It's just not the general case for consumer stuff.

I think Cloud computing as a successful business comes from the same process as suggested though. It's hard to build the platform as a business by itself.

Amazon's cloud is an offshoot of their internal elastic computing needs. Google's cloud sort of is too. Microsoft's cloud is an offshoot of their enterprise software business, same with Oracle's. IBM has been renting computers to businesses since like forever, but they used to make calculators and typewriters. I've never understood what Salesforce does, but I dunno, now it does it in the cloud rather than customer hosted?

There's some maybe purer cloud businesses, but mostly they started with a simpler hosting model and expanded into cloudy offerings.

If steam was always meant to be an all the games store, it certainly didn't start that way. When it launched, it was only for buying/using Valve's games, and it expanded later.

[block_dagger]

After looking at the history of Amazon, I'm convinced their early success was due more to ruthless business practices than being an especially good book store.

[jcynix]

Ruthless business practice? Maybe too, but very good customer support from my point as a customer, e.g.

- a shopping cart which kept my choices forever. I remember a startup clone about 20+ years ago here in Europe, whose shopping cart automatically cleared after 24 hours. That was annoying if you wanted to look for some reviews for a book later in, before deciding to buy.

- the suggestions engine "customers who bought this also bought..." was excellent 20 years ago, especially for niche products. It helped me find a lot oft interesting music, once CDs where added to the shop.

- customer comments/reviews on products. And comments on reviews, correcting facts more often than not.

Most of this started to degrade years later. No comments on reviews any more, no downvotes on bad reviews, fake reviews, "sponsored" products "suggested" in extreme, etc.

[robertlagrant]

The thing I always remember was a former colleague bought a TV from Amazon in about 2008. He got an email a few weeks later from Amazon saying that they'd refunded some of his money, as the TV had gone on sale not long after he'd bought it. That is insanely good customer service.

[MattPalmer1086]

Don't forget one click to pay. Remove all friction from the payment process.

[titanomachy]

Amazon retail was the first customer for AWS.