One thing I think is so extraordinary about Jeff Bezos is his uncanny technical prescience despite not really being a technologist. For example, the famous Steve Yegge "platforms rant" blog post [1] about how Bezos basically made a company-wide edict for microservices was very much ahead of its time. Similarly, the vision of cloud computing was much more advanced and early than any of its competitors. Considering this came from a company that already had a huge business of selling things, I think this technical foresight is pretty remarkable.<p>[1] <a href="https://plus.google.com/+RipRowan/posts/eVeouesvaVX" rel="nofollow">https://plus.google.com/+RipRowan/posts/eVeouesvaVX</a>
Bezos quotes an article about AWS, "..in fact Amazon's real business down the line will be its cloud services. Amazon will be like a bookstore that sells cocaine out the back door. Book will just be a front."
I was lucky enough to be in the audience for this, and have long wondered (and generally believed) if the questions at <a href="https://youtu.be/6nKfFHuouzA?t=2025" rel="nofollow">https://youtu.be/6nKfFHuouzA?t=2025</a> lead to reserved instances. The timing was right (reserved instances appeared in early 2009 <a href="https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/announcing-ec2-reserved-instances/" rel="nofollow">https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/announcing-ec2-reserved-ins...</a>).<p>Jeff ruminates on the problem a bit, and you can all but see the model come out by the time Jeff finishes answering the followup question :-)<p>That he thinks it would be interesting to a "subset of users" is kind of amusing :-)
Side note, why don't these videos show the slide content? That's just as useful, if not moreso, than seeing a video of the person speaking. You can hear the person without seeing them, but you can't hear the slides without seeing them, even if they're being described. A simple split screen with slides on one side and video on the other would work. Or even a picture-in-picture with the speaker. The top comment on the YouTube video has some real snark in reference to what I thought was a legitimate criticism of what would make this video much better.
In Messy: How to Be Creative and Resilient in a Tidy-Minded World, Tim Harford describe the strategy of the initial period of Amazon, and compare Bezos with Erwin Rommel, the desert Fox.