A stable and precise landing of the New Shepard booster during its fourth mission on June 19, 2016.
years of“ runway” building the division, which started almost by accident.
The company’ s various engineers— application, network and data center—“ were spending way too much time coordinating,” Bezos said. They got together and developed a bunch of systems to help manage the massive labyrinth of logistics and planning behind shipping billions of products around the world every year. With“ just a little extra work” the engineers took what they were building for Amazon and created Amazon Web Services, which has seen clients, including the CIA, come knocking.
“ If we had been out there bragging about that business we would have attracted attention from incumbents much sooner than what happened,” Bezos said.“ There is no reason in business to boast about your accomplishments. People figure them out.”
Another accomplishment is the rumored 65 million people who pay $ 99 a year to be part of Amazon Prime, a membership program that provides free shipping, streaming music and video( to watch the television shows Amazon is creating) and other services. Bezos won’ t confirm the number of Prime customers.“ We don’ t reveal that.” he said plainly.“ You do want people to know that the offerings are successful and that lots of people are using them. But you don’ t have to quantify that for consumers or enterprises.”
NEW IDEAS FOR AN OLD PAPER
After riding the online shopping wave to his reported net worth of $ 67.3 Billion— wealth that is equal to Bill Gates, Warren Buffett and the other wealthiest men in the world— Bezos invested in an industry that has been crippled by the internet.
In 2013, he bought the Washington Post for $ 250 million.“ I bought it because it’ s important,” Bezos said.“ I would never buy a financially upside down salty snack food company. That doesn’ t make any sense to me.” Bezos has a plan to change the revenue model for the Post and turn it into“ a selfsustaining, profitable enterprise.”
It was just that for about 120 of the paper’ s nearly 140 years. The newspaper( and every other newspaper in the world) would sell ads to make“ a relatively large amount of money” per reader. But that revenue model died when the firehose of free information started pouring out of the internet in the 1990s.
“ Our approach is actually very, very simple,” Bezos said.“ We need to go to a model where we make a relatively small amount of money per reader on a very large number of readers.” And he’ ll do that by turning the Post from a“ very good local paper” to a very good international publication with readers all over the globe.
“ That’ s a gift the internet brings,” he said. Getting people all over the world to read the paper in the old days of printing presses would cost a fortune. But sending it out over the internet to millions more readers is cheap and easy.
But no one’ s going to click on the Washington Post if it isn’ t worth reading.“ You can’ t turn around a restaurant with business techniques if the food isn’ t delicious. And we have delicious content. The Post is just riveting,” he said.“ They are killing it.”
When he first bought the paper, there was much hand-wringing that he would try to interfere or influence the editorial direction of the Post, a notion he flatly rejects. First he says, he wouldn’ t know how tell the newsroom what to do, likening the idea to telling a brain surgeon how to operate. And secondly, he said, he wouldn’ t have time.“ I have no desire to meddle. I have no desire to opine on everything. I’ m so busy, honestly.”
As for whether Bezos has his eye on buying any other investments in or around Washington DC, he won’ t say.
EYES ON THE SKIES
Having conquered online shopping, Amazon is busy trying to revolutionize how it delivers packages to its customers by testing drones in the quiet English countryside. The vision for Prime Air is to use small drones that fly under 400 ft. to deliver packages up to five pounds, a weight limit that covers much of Amazon products( 86 %). The drones will be able to get
FLYWASHINGTON. COM 8 SPRING 2017