I heard a Jeff Bezos quote the other day (maybe I read it here) that went roughly like: "High margins are just another way of saying missed opportunities for growth."
I always have a twinge of guilt buying from Amazon and I wish the warehouses would become more humane and all that. And I do not want to be a friend or employee of Jeff Bezos. But he does have vision and perspective that few people have. I think of several "small" decisions that he made that utterly changed things.
- any system produced internally for one group must have a public API that any other group can access. Most companies would never incur that overhead... or invent AWS.
- the margins vs growth idea above
- a bias toward long-form documents instead of meetings and emails
I don't follow the guy, so there are probably a lot of others I don't know about. But he does seem to be able to take innovative approaches.
That said, what I hear third hand tracks well with what you read. Someone who has or had several friends at AWS said that for a long time Amazon was able to pay less and treat engineers poorly because if you wanted to work on the most cutting edge cloud computing, there was only one place to be. As Microsoft and Google and others expand into the space, that is becoming less true and Amazon is having to become less Amazonish in order to retain talent. It's the kind of place where as soon as another company offers an equivalent opportunity at an equivalent pay, people look to jump ship. THAT is not very good long-term thinking and the Bezos culture also bred that atmosphere.
