There's good and bad to that. You want people thinking big and long term but you also don't want that to become more important than the short term and the small things.
That abstracted, encompassing way of thinking doesn't really care if Amazon's delivered a bad product that isn't worthy of consumers this quarter because there's always a next, and what's one customer and one sale when you've got 2 billion customers, a media empire, and and missions to the moon?
There's only so much focus any individual or company has. I guess in politics that would be political capital, there's probably something similar in business. If Bezos is the driving force behind Amazon, how does that scale as Amazon takes on more and more? And longer-term, does that carry over when he's not around anymore due to old age or a bus?
Actually, I feel we could use much more long-term focus. Because right now, pretty much every single company is solely focused on "the short term and the small things", and the result isn't delivering good products and making consumers happy - the result is optimizing products and services to minimum possible quality, while gaming consumer reactions, in order to extract as much profit as soon as possible.
Certainly agree with you in principle, but is Amazon really any different? I wouldn't want to give a family member or friend a Kindle Fire, because I Know that'd be locking them into a closed ecosystem with so so build quality. It's maybe pretentious and idealistic, but why is long-term thinking to lock people in?
This is the very first Q/A on Amazon's own Fire review page:
The first Gen Kindle fire had a faulty connection and will come loose overtime causing the device to no longer able to charge. It's a common problem but a hard fix, you have to take it apart and reattach the connection
Wouldn't long-term thinking not overlook details like that? That seems like the result of getting a product to market fast and then making consumers pay for the improvement in the next model. Which is fine if you are the entity that plans to be around for a hundred years selling those iterations, but not so much fun for the customer with a device that won't charge.
Well, there's one form of long-term thinking like "let's build a device that lasts a long time," and another like "let's build a product line/customer base that lasts a long time."
Amazon's mostly interested, it seems, in just giving people more ways to interact with them, more ways to consume their content, more reasons to subscribe to Prime, more ways to get locked in as you say. Having a long view is not necessarily equal or even in the ballpark of being consumer-friendly.
I'm not sure that focusing mostly on making Fires cheap as dirt really means there's not long-term thinking going on. A buy-it-for-life tablet, of all things, probably isn't a great investment from anybody's perspective.
> Wouldn't long-term thinking not overlook details like that?
I suspect it depends on what the long term goals are. If quality is one of them, then over time, as they improve their processes in favor of quality, these kinds of quality problems should become less and less frequent.
That abstracted, encompassing way of thinking doesn't really care if Amazon's delivered a bad product that isn't worthy of consumers this quarter because there's always a next, and what's one customer and one sale when you've got 2 billion customers, a media empire, and and missions to the moon?
There's only so much focus any individual or company has. I guess in politics that would be political capital, there's probably something similar in business. If Bezos is the driving force behind Amazon, how does that scale as Amazon takes on more and more? And longer-term, does that carry over when he's not around anymore due to old age or a bus?