With a week of Amazon dominating the headlines because of its latest Kindle rollout – four new products: a new basic Kindle, two new touch Kindles and the Kindle Fire – I took some time this weekend to look into the mind of Amazon’s founder, Jeff Bezos.
I came upon the video below of Bezos’ presentation at Y Combinator’s Startup School in 2008 discussing Amazon Web Services, a then two-year-old Amazon division of cloud-based Web services. During the Q&A portion, an attendee candidly asks Bezos, “What do you think of Google App Engine?”
“Well, I anticipated that question,” Bezos said as the crowd reacted with a laugh. “First of all, let me say, we have a long history, that I like, of not talking about other companies. So, we make exceptions to it occasionally, but it’s a pretty good policy in general.”
As to why that is, he continued: “What we have in our business, is that we are more innovative and do more interesting things if we stay customer focused instead of competitor focused.”
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Bezo’s answer to this question, which goes on for a little more than three minutes, is an interesting take on competition, and I’d encourage you to watch it, especially keeping in mind that Amazon’s Fire could put up a good fight against Apple’s iPad dominance in the coming year.
