Why is Amazon.com a successful business?

Answer 1

The customer is King here! Amazon pampers their customers, tracks their tastes and uses this information to create a unique customer experience. This e-tailer cultivates relationships that lead to customers liking and trusting them. This kind of service surpasses the most brilliant technology in use today. Amazon brought in the world of successful one-to-one marketing, a personal touch from another era. Teams are small. They are assigned authority and empowered to solve a problem as a service in anyway they see fit. End up with a design that is as minimal as possible. Simplicity is the key if you really want to build large distributed systems. Take it for granted stuff fails, that's reality, embrace it. For example, go more with a fast reboot and fast recover approach. With a decent spread of data and services you might get close to 100%. Create self-healing, self-organizing lights out operations. There's bound to be problems with anything that produces hype before real implementation. Use measurement and objective debate to separate the good from the bad. I've been to several presentations by ex-Amazoners and this is the aspect of Amazon that strikes me as uniquely different and interesting from other companies. Their deep seated ethic is to expose real customers to a choice and see which one works best and to make decisions based on those tests. Write the tools if necessary. Look for three things in interviews: enthusiasm, creativity, competence. The single biggest predictor of success at Amazon.com was enthusiasm. Hire a Bob. Someone who knows their stuff, has incredible debugging skills and system knowledge, and most importantly, has the stones to tackle the worst high pressure problems imaginable by just leaping in. Innovation can only come from the bottom. Those closest to the problem are in the best position to solve it. any organization that depends on innovation must embrace chaos. Loyalty and obedience are not your tools.