In customers’ minds, the Amazon brand meant books only. He wanted it to be more malleable, like Richard Branson’s Virgin, which stood for everything from music to airlines to liquor. Bezos also needed Amazon to generate the kind of returns that would allow him to invest in technology and stay ahead of rivals. “By that time, Jeff had done the math on a legal pad and knew this had to happen. It was go really big or go home,” says Joel Spiegel, a vice president of engineering who had spent time at Microsoft and Apple.
