Amazon The Company Quotes & Sayings

The challenge, however, is that Google, Facebook, Netflix, and Amazon do not publish their algorithms. In fact, the methods they use to filter the information you see are deeply proprietary and the "secret sauce" that drives each company's profitability. The problem with this invisible "black box" algorithmic approach to information is that we do not know what has been edited out for us and what we are not seeing. As a result, our digital lives, mediated through a sea of screens, are being actively manipulated and filtered on a daily basis in ways that are both opaque and indecipherable. — Marc Goodman

I find by my calculations, which are according to revealed inspiration, that the sword of death is now approaching us, in the shape of pestilence, war more horrible than has been known in three lifetimes, and famine. — Nostradamus

From the beginning ... I wanted to build a company that could sustain not for two years or four years or even ten years but be something that really matters over time the way Amazon and Google and others have. — Mark Pincus

All you need to make a film is a girl and a gun — Jean-Luc Godard

Today, we have our own concentrations of economic power. Instead of Standard Oil, U.S. Steel, the Union Pacific Railroad, and J. P. Morgan and Company, we have Amazon, Google, Apple, Facebook, and Microsoft. — George Packer

A company doesn't have to compete with Amazon. A company can instead innovate in sectors Amazon doesn't presently care about. — J.A. Konrath

Unlike traditional retailers, Amazon boasted what was called a negative operating cycle. Customers paid with their credit cards when their books shipped but Amazon settled its accounts with the book distributors only every few months. With every sale, Amazon put more cash in the bank, giving it a steady stream of capital to fund its operations and expansion.14 The company could also lay claim to a uniquely high return on invested capital. Unlike brick-and-mortar retailers, whose inventories were spread out across hundreds or thousands of stores around the country, Amazon had one website and, at that time, a single warehouse and inventory. Amazon's ratio of fixed costs to revenue was considerably more favorable than that of its offline competitors. In other words, Bezos and Covey argued, a dollar that was plugged into Amazon's infrastructure could lead to exponentially greater returns than a dollar that went into the infrastructure of any other retailer in the world. — Brad Stone

Amazon took the idea of a man inside the computer and created a service with the same name. A person or company can present a task to the Mechanical Turk Web site, and hordes of invisible people will chip away at it, doing work that's eerily human but requires no personal interaction and very little money. These hardworking people are like the little man inside the chess computer: you can't see them, but they're doing all the work. — Seth Godin

Unlike John Lasseter's bosses at Disney, Bezos was open to the entrepreneurial contributions of Amazon's individual employees - even when those ideas were outside what Wall Street (and even his own board of directors) considered the company's core business. AWS represents precisely the kind of value creation any CEO or shareholder would want from their employees. Want your employees to come up with multibillion-dollar ideas while on the job? You have to attract professionals with the founder mind-set and then harness their entrepreneurial impulses for your company. As Intuit CEO Brad Smith told us, A leader's job is not to put greatness into people, but rather to recognize that it already exists, and to create the environment where that greatness can emerge and grow. — Reid Hoffman

We see Google experimenting in so many places outside of its core search and advertising business, whether that's bringing broadband Internet to the world or funding an entirely separate company to pursue solutions to disease and mortality. Amazon's one of the few other companies that thinks as big as Google does. — Brad Stone

In 1972, Texaco Oil Company, in partnership with PetroEcuador, the state-run oil company of Ecuador, began to drill for oil in the jungles of the Ecuadorian Amazon. — Peter Coyote

His fierce appreciation of female beauty, the unrelenting desire he felt for their company, the pleasure he both derived and sought to give, had led him in and out of quite a few bedroom doors. — Roy L. Pickering Jr.

Amazon's identity and goals are never clear and always fluid, which makes the company destabilizing and intimidating. — George Packer

To many book professionals, Amazon is a ruthless predator. The company claims to want a more literate world - and it came along when the book world was in distress, offering a vital new source of sales. — George Packer

One woman couldn't change the world. She could just make small parts of it better. — Victoria Thompson

HAZEL: "THERE," she said.The official building on their left had a single word etched on the glass doors: AMAZON.
"oh," Frank said."Uh, no, Hazel. That's a modern thing. They're a company, Right? they sell stuff on the internet. They're not actually Amazons."
"Unless ... " Percy walked through the doors. — Rick Riordan

One of the things that I hope will distinguish Amazon is that we continue to be a company that defies easy analogy. This requires a lot of innovation, and innovation requires a lot of random walk. — Jeff Bezos

There is hopeful symbolism in the fact that flags do not wave in a vacuum. — Arthur C. Clarke

Booksellers are tied to publishing - they need conventional publishing models to continue - but for those companies, that's not the case. Amazon is an infrastructure company; Apple sells hardware; Google is really an advertising company. You can't afford as a publisher to have those companies control your route to market. — Nick Harkaway

The removal of an electron from the surface of an atom - that is, the ionization of the atom - means a fundamental structural change in its surface layer. — Johannes Stark

It is really this "mathematical mindset" that seems to be most useful to those who are not trained to think as mathematicians. — Edward Frenkel

Nothing is a mistake. There's no win and no fail. There's only make. — Corita Kent

Almost no one wants to admit the genius of Jeff Bezos and Amazon. Apparently, many have failed to see that Amazon has become the world's biggest retail company. — Hubert Burda

All I wanted,' London said later, 'was a quiet place in the counry to write and loaf in and get out of Nature that something which we all need, only the most of us don't know it. — Jack London

When you take a look at the transition from server software to Azure, what's going on in terms of cloud infrastructure, the company is absolutely the No. 1 company serving enterprise backbone needs, which is fantastic. It's making the migration to cloud. We started a good thing with Azure, and the company has made well more than two years of progress in terms of being able to compete with the right cost profile, margin structure, and innovation versus Amazon. — Steve Ballmer

Amazon thrived because it implemented the online bookstore idea better than any of its early rivals did, not because it was the only company to have the idea or the first company to have the idea. It continues to grow only because it keeps trying to improve on the details of the idea and the way it puts it into practise. — Max McKeown

Amazon may be the most beguiling company that ever existed, and it is just getting started. It is both missionary and mercenary ... That has always been a potent combination. — Brad Stone

In early 2002, as part of a new personal ritual, he took time after the holidays to think and read. (In this respect, Microsoft's Bill Gates, who also took such annual think weeks, served as a positive example.) Returning to the company after a few weeks, Bezos presented his next big idea to the S Team in the basement of his Medina, Washington, home. The entire company, he said, would restructure itself around what he called "two-pizza teams." Employees would be organized into autonomous groups of fewer than ten people - small enough that, when working late, the team members could be fed with two pizza pies. These teams would be independently set loose on Amazon's biggest problems. — Brad Stone

Once you create and dominate a niche market, then you should gradually expand into related and slightly broader markets. Amazon shows how it can be done. Jeff Bezos's founding vision was to dominate all of online retail, but he very deliberately started with books. There were millions of books to catalog, but they all had roughly the same shape, they were easy to ship, and some of the most rarely sold books - those least profitable for any retail store to keep in stock - also drew the most enthusiastic customers. Amazon became the dominant solution for anyone located far from a bookstore or seeking something unusual. Amazon then had two options: expand the number of people who read books, or expand to adjacent markets. They chose the latter, starting with the most similar markets: CDs, videos, and software. Amazon continued to add categories gradually until it had become the world's general store. The name itself brilliantly encapsulated the company's scaling strategy. — Peter Thiel

If Amazon's dream of a world without gatekeepers becomes reality, then the company itself will become a powerful gatekeeper. — Evgeny Morozov

The key is to take a larger project or goal and break it down into smaller problems to be solved, constraining the scope of work to solving a key problem, and then another key problem.
This strategy, of breaking a project down into discrete, relatively small problems to be resolved, is what Bing Gordon, a cofounder and the former chief creative officer of the video game company Electronic Arts, calls smallifying. Now a partner at the venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins, Gordon has deep experience leading and working with software development teams. He's also currently on the board of directors of Amazon and Zynga. At Electronic Arts, Gordon found that when software teams worked on longer-term projects, they were inefficient and took unnecessary paths. However, when job tasks were broken down into particular problems to be solved, which were manageable and could be tackled within one or two weeks, developers were more creative and effective. — Peter Sims

I've drunk Amazon's free Diet Coke. Nothing makes more sense to me than a company trying to make bookselling into a profitable business. I'm not anti-Amazon, and I'm not pro-publishers either. I'm pro-books. — Lev Grossman

Historically, noted James Manyika, one of the authors of the McKinsey report, companies kept their eyes on competitors "who looked like them, were in their sector and in their geography." Not anymore. Google started as a search engine and is now also becoming a car company and a home energy management system. Apple is a computer manufacturer that is now the biggest music seller and is also going into the car business, but in the meantime, with Apple Pay, it's also becoming a bank. Amazon, a retailer, came out of nowhere to steal a march on both IBM and HP in cloud computing. Ten years ago neither company would have listed Amazon as a competitor. But Amazon needed more cloud computing power to run its own business and then decided that cloud computing was a business! And now Amazon is also a Hollywood studio. — Thomas L. Friedman

My dad was a fairy," said Zach. "And by that I don't mean he dressed well and enjoyed musical theatre. — Ben Aaronovitch

Amazon is certainly not a perfect company. However, doctors, teachers, engineers, journalists, politicians, and labor unions are also on a continuum of consciousness, and none are perfect either. It is easy to judge and find fault with any company if that is what one's ideological biases wish to see. — John Mackey

Like most plutocrats, I, too, am a proud and unapologetic capitalist. I have founded, cofounded or funded over 30 companies across a range of industries. I was the first non-family investor in Amazon. I cofounded a company called aQuantive that we sold to Microsoft for 6.4 billion dollars. My friends and I, we own a bank. — Nick Hanauer

This is a very highly charged investigation. People are very interested in this, and we've got a prosecutor, a very well respected prosecutor who's been looking at this issue, this investigation for a long time. — Alberto Gonzales

These are not fever dreams. They are near inevitabilities. It's an easy prediction to make - that Jeff Bezos will do what he has always done. He will attempt to move faster, work his employees harder, make bolder bets, and pursue both big inventions and small ones, all to achieve his grand vision for Amazon - that it be not just an everything store, but ultimately an everything company. — Brad Stone