Amazon Unbound: Jeff Bezos and the Invention of a Global Empire

by Brad Stone

With another like-minded deputy, Andy Jassy, Bezos also expanded in an even more surprising direction. Contemplating the way his own engineers worked, and the expertise the company had developed in building a stable computing infrastructure that could withstand enormous seasonal spikes in traffic, he conceived of a new business called Amazon Web Services. The idea was that Amazon would sell raw computing power to other organizations, who could access it online and use it to economically run their own operations. The business plan was barely understandable to many of Amazon’s own employees and board members. But the forty-year-old Bezos believed in it, micromanaging the project and sending extraordinarily detailed recommendations and goals to AWS team leaders, often late at night. “This has to scale to infinity with no planned downtime,” he told the beleaguered engineers working on the project. “Infinity!” At the same time, Bezos was shocked by Apple’s rapid ascendance in music sales with its iPod music player and iTunes store. Concerned about a similar incursion into books, he initiated a secret project to create Amazon’s own digital book reader, the Kindle. Colleagues thought it was crazy for the perennially money-losing Amazon to make gadgets. “I absolutely know it’s hard, but we’ll learn how to do it,” Bezos told them. He put another deputy, Steve Kessel, in charge and asked him to drop his responsibilities running Amazon’s original bookselling business and to “proceed ...