Working Backwards: Insights, Stories, and Secrets from Inside Amazon

by Colin Bryar

So, although we knew nothing about building hardware, Jeff and Steve decided that the place to start was at the consumption end of the chain: hardware, specifically e-books. There were multiple reasons for this. One was that books were still the single largest category at Amazon and the one most associated with the company. Music was the first category to move to digital in the marketplace, but Apple had a big head start and our sessions did not produce a PR/FAQ for a music device or service idea that was sufficiently compelling. Video had not gone digital yet, which seemed like an opportunity, but it became apparent that there were a number of barriers to creating a great video experience at that time. These included getting the rights from the studios to offer their movies and TV shows digitally, the time it would take to download massive video files over the slow (at the time) internet, and uncertainty about how consumers would play these video files on their TVs.