Invent and Wander: The Collected Writings of Jeff Bezos

by Jeff Bezos

“We completely reinvented the way that companies buy computation,” Bezos says. “Traditionally, if you were a company and needed computation, you would build a data center, and you’d fill that data center with servers, and you’d have to upgrade the operating systems of those servers and keep everything running, and so on. None of that added any value to what the business was doing. It was kind of price-of-admission, undifferentiated heavy lifting.” Bezos realized that this process was also holding back various groups of innovators within Amazon itself. The company’s applications developers had been in a constant struggle with the hardware teams, but Bezos made them develop some standard application programming interfaces (APIs) and access to computing resources. “As soon as we did that, it was immediately obvious that every company in the world was going to want this,” he says. For a while a miracle happened: for a few years no other companies got into the space as competitors. Bezos’s vision was far ahead of everyone else’s. “It was the greatest piece of business luck in the history of business, so far as I know,” he says.