Jeff would likely have been making just such an error of omission if his October 2004 email had read, “Let’s wait to introduce free shipping and just focus on making this 2004 holiday season our best ever!” If he had stopped pressing the teams for more free shipping ideas, there would no doubt have been a sigh of relief. We would have looked at each other and said thank goodness we made the right call to pause. Instead of marking a turning point in Amazon’s history, that mid-October day might have been remarkable in another way. It might have been the moment we made a disastrous mistake, even
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