Jeff Bezos Interview with Wired Magazine

    Jeff Bezos, CEO of Amazon, is not as well known to the general public as the late Steve Jobs. About him no films and television shows have been shot. However, observers believe that it is he who becomes "the main technology" in America, given how much of the Internet is based on Amazon's cloud services. This interview is considered by some to be the main event of 2011 in IT journalism. I offer an abridged 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, of course, could not do without a comparison with the iPad. The conclusion reached by 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 magnificent closed iOS operating system is designed to emphasize the advantages of hardware and provide users with the functions of personal computers in the new touch-screen format (including the tasks of video conferencing, text editing, etc.)

    Unlike Apple, whose turnover is 91% in the sale of equipment, and only 6% - in the sale of digital content via iTunes, Amazon is a company focused specifically on the sale of digital content, almost half of which is the sale of books, music, TV show and movies. The Fire tablet is just part of the process chain to deliver content to consumers. 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 technical specifications and industrial design?

    iPad is focused on downloading content, while Fire is focused on streaming. This difference in ideology saves you a hundred dollars on the cost of the built-in drive (maximum 8GB versus minimum 16GB on iPad). Amazon believes that the user should not be interested in the details of the operating system, he simply should be able to download the damn movie.

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

    • Foursquare - 3 million checks 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 of grocery card recipients.
    • Yelp - a repository of over 22 million reviews.

    An interview with a 15-year-old man who heads this company in which Jeff Bezos shares his thoughts on cloud computing, commerce, management, and space expeditions.

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

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

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

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

    IN:How has Amazon been able to continuously upgrade over 15 years?

    A: Our corporate culture is based on the acceptance of the fact that if you want to invent, you will break something. Many people do not like this inside 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 on this list. They did a lot of innovative things, some of which are in the shadow of big business. For example Kinect.

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

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

    Q: Publishing houses will not agree with you.

    A: We are pioneers in the corporate environment, and we love to break even our own business. The recording industry should serve as 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 publishers are harming their business by discouraging change.

    Q: What else do you do differently than other publishers?

    ABOUT:We believe that royalties paid for e-books are inadequate. 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 are Amazon's plans for producing content in other formats?

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

    IN:Let's talk about web services. Amazon Web Services dominates the hosting industry - some say you're Coca-Cola, but you don't have Pepsi. How did the online store become a provider for giants such as Foursquare, NASA, Netflix, and The New York Times?

    A: About 9 years ago, we had problems with the internal infrastructure. We started building a reliable infrastructure for our own products, and then we realized: “Yeah, everyone who needs scalable web applications will need the infrastructure.” We decided that due to a little extra effort we can offer it to everyone. Since we do it anyway, let's sell it.

    IN: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 the best web service at a price that customers could not get anywhere else. Technology companies always operate at high margins, but not us. Amazon is the only low-margin technology company.

    Q: How did you achieve this?

    A: Due to attention to minor defects. They lead to higher costs. The most expensive thing you can do is make a mistake. We concentrate on the smallest defects and nip them in the bud. This reduces our costs because everything starts to “just work.”

    IN:You have expanded your 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 revolution is about 100 milliseconds or more. Something can run in parallel, but usually you have at least eight cycles each of 100 ms. This slows down browsing. We shared this process. If you are able to transfer calculations to the cloud platform, you get huge computing resources. What takes 100 ms on a wifi network takes 5 ms on our Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud servers. Therefore, by transferring part of the calculations to the cloud, we were able to significantly speed up browsing.

    IN:A few years ago, there was a fuss about the fact that Amazon received a patent for purchases in one click. Now patents are perceived as a real hindrance to creativity and innovation. Has your approach to patenting 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 1-click purchase rights!

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

    IN:You gave $ 42 million to the Long Now Foundation for the development of gigantic watches with a life of 10,000 years. How does this project relate to what you do at Amazon?

    A: It corresponds to my worldview. If everything you work on requires a 3-year planning horizon, you are competing with a bunch of other people. But if you invest in the horizon for 7 years, you begin to compete with only a few, because few people want to do this. By expanding the planning horizon, you can get involved in projects that you will never fall into otherwise. At Amazon, we love working from 5 to 7 years. We want to plant seeds, let them grow, and we are persistent in this. We are persistent in approaches and flexible in details.

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