{"id":8687,"date":"2014-04-10T16:41:45","date_gmt":"2014-04-10T20:41:45","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/?p=8687"},"modified":"2014-04-10T16:41:45","modified_gmt":"2014-04-10T20:41:45","slug":"the-birth-of-amazon-com","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/2014\/04\/10\/the-birth-of-amazon-com\/","title":{"rendered":"The Birth of Amazon.com"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/blogs.law.harvard.edu\/philg\/2014\/04\/09\/the-birth-of-amazon-com\/\">Philip Greenspun<\/a> finds lots of interesting passages in Brad Stone&rsquo;s <a href=\"http:\/\/www.amazon.com\/dp\/B00BWQW73E\/?tag=michaeltsai-20\">The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon<\/a>:<\/p>\n<blockquote cite=\"http:\/\/blogs.law.harvard.edu\/philg\/2014\/04\/09\/the-birth-of-amazon-com\/\">\n<p>PowerPoint is a very imprecise communication mechanism,&rdquo; says Jeff Holden, Bezos&rsquo;s former D. E. Shaw colleague, who by that point had joined the S Team. &ldquo;It is fantastically easy to hide between bullet points. You are never forced to express your thoughts completely.&rdquo; Bezos announced that employees could no longer use such corporate crutches and would have to write their presentations in prose, in what he called narratives.<\/p>\n<p>[&#8230;]<\/p>\n<p>Bill Miller, the chief investment officer at Legg Mason Capital Management and a major Amazon shareholder, asked Bezos at the time about the profitability prospects for AWS. Bezos predicted they would be good over the long term but said that he didn&rsquo;t want to repeat &ldquo;Steve Jobs&rsquo;s mistake&rdquo; of pricing the iPhone in a way that was so fantastically profitable that the smartphone market became a magnet for competition. The comment reflected his distinctive business philosophy. Bezos believed that high margins justified rivals&rsquo; investments in research and development and attracted more competition, while low margins attracted customers and were more defensible.<\/p><\/blockquote>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Philip Greenspun finds lots of interesting passages in Brad Stone&rsquo;s The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon: PowerPoint is a very imprecise communication mechanism,&rdquo; says Jeff Holden, Bezos&rsquo;s former D. E. Shaw colleague, who by that point had joined the S Team. &ldquo;It is fantastically easy to hide between bullet points. You [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"apple_news_api_created_at":"","apple_news_api_id":"","apple_news_api_modified_at":"","apple_news_api_revision":"","apple_news_api_share_url":"","apple_news_coverimage":0,"apple_news_coverimage_caption":"","apple_news_is_hidden":false,"apple_news_is_paid":false,"apple_news_is_preview":false,"apple_news_is_sponsored":false,"apple_news_maturity_rating":"","apple_news_metadata":"\"\"","apple_news_pullquote":"","apple_news_pullquote_position":"","apple_news_slug":"","apple_news_sections":"\"\"","apple_news_suppress_video_url":false,"apple_news_use_image_component":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[19,672,63,101,295,85,601,837],"class_list":["post-8687","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-technology","tag-amazon","tag-amazon-web-services","tag-book","tag-business","tag-history","tag-iphone","tag-jeff-bezos","tag-microsoft-powerpoint"],"apple_news_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8687","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8687"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8687\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8687"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8687"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8687"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}