Weekly NDM

Jeff Bezos: I’ve made billions of dollars of failures at Amazon

This article is about how Jeff Bezos, the Amazon CEO, admits that he has made billions of dollars out of the failures at Amazon including the fire phone. He then continues to go on to say that without those experiments then the company wouldn't be where it is and that embracing failures is key to a modern business' survival.

• “I’ve made billions of dollars of failures at amazon.com. Literally,” Bezos told the Business Insider Ignition conference in New York, saying that it would be akin to having “a root canal with no anaesthesia” to dwell on them.
• “None of those things are fun, but they also don’t matter,” said Bezos. “What really matters is that companies that don’t continue to experiment – companies that don’t embrace failure – they eventually get into a desperate position, where the only thing they can do is make a ‘Hail Mary’ bet at the very end of their corporate existence. I don’t believe in bet-the-company bets.”
• “If you’re going to take bold bets, they’re going to be experiments,” Bezos said. “And if they’re experiments you don’t know ahead of time if they’re going to work. Experiments are by their very nature prone to failure. But a few big successes compensate for dozens and dozens of things that didn’t work.”
• The Fire Phone is one such experiment that has not lived up to expectations, failing to sell and leaving Amazon forced to write off $170m on unsold Fire Phones.
• “I didn’t know anything about the newspaper business, but I did know about the internet,” said Bezos of the purchase stating that he is “very optimistic about the future of the Post” despite seeing it as “hopeless” from the outside.

This article is interesting as it contains many interesting quotes from the CEO of Amazon about the institution. It shows that Amazon is an institution that has grown significantly over the years that they may in fact experiment and lose money, but it doesn't take away from how large of an institution it is.

http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/dec/03/jeff-bezos-billions-dollars-failures-amazon