Jeff Bezos Interview Wired Magazine

Jeff Bezos, CEO of Amazon is not as well known to the general public as the late Steve Jobs. About him not filmed movies and TV shows. However, observers believe that it is he who becomes the "chief technology" in America, given how much of the Internet is based on Amazon cloud services. This interview, some consider the main event in 2011 in IT journalism. I offer a shortened translation, and the original can be read here .

The interview was given to Wired magazine on the eve of the presentation of the Kindle Fire tablet and, naturally, could not do without a comparison with the iPad. The conclusion reached by the author of the article Steven Levy is: iPad is the flagship product of the post-PC era, and Fire is the post-web era. Apple's tablet is in many ways a masterpiece of engineering, primarily hardware. The gorgeous closed iOS operating system is designed to emphasize the advantages of hardware and to provide users with the functions of personal computers in the new format of the touch interface (including the tasks of video conferencing, text editing, etc.)

Unlike Apple, whose turnover is 91% of the sale of equipment, and only 6% is the sale of digital content through iTunes, Amazon is a company focused on the sale of digital content, almost half of whose income is the sale of books, music, TV show and movies. The Fire Tablet is just a part of the technological chain for delivering content to the consumer. This is just a device that you can buy for $ 199 and get your hands on access to 12,000 films. Who cares about its specifications and industrial design?
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The iPad is focused on downloading content, while Fire is focused on streaming. This difference in ideology allows you to save a hundred dollars on the cost of the built-in storage (maximum 8GB versus minimum 16GB for iPad). Amazon believes that the user should not be interested in the details of the operating system, he should just be able to download the damn movie.

At the same time, Amazon has one key technological innovation: Silk fast browser. This browser itself is a continuation of Amazon cloud services and is based on the preliminary processing of requests in the data center. Data centers are the cornerstone of Amazon, which provides cloud services even to its direct competitors, such as Netflix. Now a significant part of the global traffic is provided by Amazon servers, for example:

• Foursquare - 3 million check-ins per day.
• Harvard Medical School - a huge base for the development of genomic models.
• NASA Jet Propulsion Lab - processing satellite photos.
• Netflix - 25% of US Internet traffic
• Newsweek - 1 million page views per hour.
• US Department of Agriculture - GIS recipients of grocery cards.
• Yelp - repository of over 22 million reviews.

Interview with a man who has led this company for 15 years, in which Jeff Bezos shares his thoughts on cloud computing, commerce, management and space missions.

QUESTION: Fire seems to be more than just another iPad competitor.

ANSWER: Yeah. In fact, we built an integrated media service. Equipment is part of this service, but only a part.

Q: The price is also a part of it, and you estimate it only at $ 199.

A: We believe that this is a unique market approach: a premium product at a non-premium price. Our company is used to low margins.

Q: How was Amazon able to continuously upgrade for 15 years?

A: Our corporate culture is based on accepting the fact that if you want to invent, you will break something. Many do not like this within the company, but we are developing this way.

Q: Eric Schmidt once said that now there are four technology leaders: Google, Apple, Facebook and Amazon. Are you considering Amazon in this vein?

A: I would include Microsoft in this list. They have done a lot of innovative things, some of which are in the shadow of big business. For example Kinect.

Q: Amazon began publishing books on its own. What do you do differently from traditional publishers?

A: For example, pricing. The maximum price of a regular book - I do not take textbooks or special literature - can not exceed $ 9.99.

Q: Publishing houses will not agree with you.

A: We are pioneers in the corporate environment, and we love breaking even our own business. The recording industry should be a lesson to everyone else: if you cannot prevent a revolution, lead it. I think in the book business we are ahead of the process, but some publishing houses harm their business by discouraging change.

Q: What else do you do not like other publishers?

A: We believe that royalties paid for e-books are insufficient. Therefore, in our Kindle Direct Publishing program, if the price of your book is from 2.99 to 9.99, we pay you 70% of the income.

Q: What plans does Amazon have for producing content in other formats?

A: For example, we have studios.amazon.com. This is a completely new way to make movies. Amazon crowdsourcing the production of a “test film” to the point where it is taken into production by real movie studios. The first contract was signed between Amazon and Warner Bros.

Q: Let's talk about web services. Amazon Web Services dominates hosting — some say you are Coca-Cola, but Pepsi is not on you. How did the online store become a provider for giants like Foursquare, NASA, Netflix, and The New York Times?

A: About 9 years ago, we had problems with internal infrastructure. We began to build a robust infrastructure for our own products, and then we realized: "Yeah, everyone who needs scalable web applications will need infrastructure." We decided that due to the small additional efforts we would be able to offer it to everyone. Since we're still doing it, let's sell it.

Q: Young startups say that even if Google offered them free hosting, they would still use Amazon. Why do you think?

A: We had to build a better web service at a price that customers could not get anywhere. Technology companies always operate at a high margin, but not us. Amazon is the only technology company with a low margin.

Q: How did you achieve this?

A: Due to the attention to minor defects. They lead to increased costs. The most expensive thing you can do is make a mistake. We concentrate on the smallest defects and stop them at the root. This reduces our costs, because everything starts to "just work."

Q: You have expanded the use of Amazon Web Services with the new Silk browser. How?

A: One of the reasons that the mobile Internet is slow is that, on average, a web page downloads data from 13 different servers. On a mobile device, even with fast wifi, each download turnover is about 100 milliseconds or more. Something can be done in parallel, but usually you have at least eight cycles each 100 ms. It slows down browsing. We have shared this process. If you are able to transfer calculations to a cloud platform, you get huge computing resources. What takes 100 ms on the wifi network takes 5 ms on our Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud servers. Therefore, by transferring some of the computations to the cloud, we were able to significantly speed up browsing.

Q: A few years ago, the noise was raised because Amazon received a patent for purchases in one click. Now patents are perceived as a real obstacle to creativity and innovation. Your approach to patenting has not changed?

A: For many years I thought that software patents should be revoked or significantly reduced. It is impossible to measure their impact on the industry accurately, but the balance is most likely negative.

Q: But without software patents, you would not have exclusive rights to purchases in 1 click!

A: If it were the price for a significant reduction in software patenting, it would be great.

Q: You gave $ 42 million to the Long Now Foundation to develop giant watches with a lifespan of 10,000 years. How does this project relate to what you are doing at Amazon?

A: It fits my worldview. If everything you work on requires a planning horizon of 3 years, you are competing with a bunch of other people. But if you invest in a horizon of 7 years, you start to compete with only a few, because few people want to do it. By expanding the planning horizon, you can be involved in projects that you will never be in any other way. In Amazon, we love to work from 5 to 7 years. We want to plant seeds, let them grow, and in this we are persistent. We are persistent in approaching and flexible in details.