“Every time customers grab an item off a shelf, Amazon says the product is automatically put into the shopping cart of their online account. If customers put the item back on the shelf, Amazon removes it from their virtual basket.”— Nick Wingfield, nytimes.com
“Growth becomes the overriding motivation — something treasured for its own sake, not for anything it brings to the world.”— Noam Cohen, nytimes.com
“If you think that’s a big failure, we’re working on much bigger failures right now — and I am not kidding. Some of them are going to make the Fire Phone look like a tiny little blip.”— Jeff Bezos, geekwire.com
“Amazon is doing great damage to tax paying retailers. Towns, cities and states throughout the U.S. are being hurt — many jobs being lost!”— Donald Trump, twitter.com
“Amazon made nearly $1.4 billion in advertising revenue last year — more than Snapchat, Yelp or Pandora. Per eMarketer, it's slated to grow its ad business by another 30% this year to $1.8 billion.”— Sara Fischer, axios.com
“The technology Graphiq has developed to connect the dots between billions of pieces of information could be valuable to Amazon as it tries to make Alexa smarter. Akin to Siri on the iPhone, Alexa answers queries about the weather, sports and other topics on devices such as Amazon's Echo speaker. Las…”— Paresh Dave, latimes.com
“Founded in 2009 as FindTheBest, the company sought to collect and organize details about products, places and people to simplify online research.”— Paresh Dave, latimes.com
“Amazon’s proposed purchase of Whole Foods could impact neighborhood grocery stores and hardworking consumers across America. Congress has a responsibility to fully scrutinize this merger before it goes ahead.”— David Cicilline, reuters.com
“Amazon seems to be a multi-trillion dollar monopoly hiding in plain sight.”— Chamath Palihapitiya, forbes.com
“The Echo Show is Amazon's new $230 device with a built-in camera and touchscreen, powered by the AI assistant Alexa.”— Mat Honan, buzzfeed.com
“Nothing about the way Amazon and Walmart do business and nothing about the way their business is set up is appropriate for a luxury brand. When you think about their completely egalitarian and no-barriers-to-entry model for their marketplaces — which is what’s served them so well as far, as expansio…”— Charlie Cole, glossy.co
“Ironically enough, Wave was a great platform, may they rest in peace. But making something a platform is not going to make you an instant success. A platform needs a killer app. Facebook -- that is, the stock service they offer with walls and friends and such -- is the killer app for the Facebook Pl…”— Steve Yegge, plus.google.com
“A product is useless without a platform, or more precisely and accurately, a platform-less product will always be replaced by an equivalent platform-ized product.”— Steve Yegge, plus.google.com
“When software -- or idea-ware for that matter -- fails to be accessible to anyone for any reason, it is the fault of the software or of the messaging of the idea. It is an Accessibility failure.”— Steve Yegge, plus.google.com
“The other big realization he had was that he can't always build the right thing. I think Larry Tesler might have struck some kind of chord in Bezos when he said his mom couldn't use the goddamn website. It's not even super clear whose mom he was talking about, and doesn't really matter, because nobo…”— Steve Yegge, plus.google.com
“The only necessary parts of the book business are authors and readers. Everybody else has to figure out how to be useful and relevant in connecting those two groups.”— Russ Grandinetti, vanityfair.com
“If the Kindle didn’t have any books on it, guess how many Kindles would be selling? None. They want the books, and they want the publishers’ profits, too? They should get nothing. Zero.”— Andrew Wylie, vanityfair.com
“If Amazon succeeds, they will lower the retail price—$9.99, $6.99, $3.99, $1.99. And instead of making $4 on your hardcover, you’ll be making 10 cents a copy on all editions. And you will not be able to afford to write a book. No one, unless they have inherited $50 million, will be able to afford to…”— Andrew Wylie, vanityfair.com
“Barnes & Noble’s lone literary-fiction buyer, Sessalee Hensley, could make (or break) a book with a large order (or a disappointingly small one). If you talked to a publisher in the early 2000s, chances are they would complain to you about the tyranny of Sessalee. No one used her last name; the most…”— Keith Gessen, vanityfair.com