> When you look at something like, go back in time when we started working on Kindle almost seven years ago…. There you just have to place a bet. If you place enough of those bets, and if you place them early enough, none of them are ever betting the company. By the time you are betting the company, it means you haven’t invented for too long.
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> If you invent frequently and are willing to fail, then you never get to that point where you really need to bet the whole company. AWS also started about six or seven years ago. We are planting more seeds right now, and it is too early to talk about them, but we are going to continue to plant seeds. And I can guarantee you that everything we do will not work. And, I am never concerned about that…. We are stubborn on vision. We are flexible on details…. We don’t give up on things easily. Our third-party seller business is an example of that. It took us three tries to get the third-party seller business to work. We didn’t give up.
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> But. if you get to a point where you look at it and you say look, we are continuing invest a lot of money in this, and it’s not working and we have a bunch of other good businesses, and this is a hypothetical scenario, and we are going to give up on this. On the day you decide to give up on it, what happens? Your operating margins go up because you stopped investing in something that wasn’t working. Is that really such a bad day?
via [geekwire.com](http://www.geekwire.com/2011/amazons-bezos-innovation)
Sometimes I think Bezos is one of only a handful of CEOs out there who are even close to Steve Jobs’ level of understanding when it comes to vision.
People aren’t wrong when they say a possible Amazon Tablet would be the one product to give the iPad a run for its money. It would certainly destroy every other Android/Palm/RIM/whatever out there. And while I don’t think it would “kill” the iPad, by any means, a tablet that comes from one of the world’s greatest retailers, that has an established set of media stores, and is being driven by someone with the mind of Bezos has a great chance of carving its own niche of success, at least.
The trick for Bezos will be establishing that differentiation. Why buy this instead of the iPad? Will it be cheaper? Will it have access to more content? The Kindle isn’t the most elegant piece of hardware on earth, but it’s selling very well, because it doesn’t try to compete with the iPad or iPod touch. It’s a great reader—nothing more. And it’s relatively cheap. So what will make the Amazon tablet special?
This is the product to watch out for over the next several months.
