Jeff
Bezos shares many similarities with the late Steve Jobs, making him the
next most dominant figure in the technology industry.
With the passing of Steve Jobs earlier this
month, the tech industry lost one of its most revered icons. So where
will the industry turn for inspiration now that Jobs is gone?
New Apple CEO Tim Cook will keep the business cranking along, but
he's unlikely to inspire the same kind of devotion as Jobs. Facebook
leader Mark Zuckerberg has star power, but he and his company are still
too young and untested. At Google, Larry Page is too awkward and Eric
Schmidt too slick, and a lot of the company's recent products are too
unfinished.
But there's one tech leader who just might fit the bill: Amazon's Jeff Bezos.
Bezos runs his business the same way Steve Jobs ran his, with a relentless focus on long-term value over short-term profits and a willingness to place big bets in seemingly unrelated new areas.
Steve Jobs took Apple on a detour from personal computers into music
with the iPod, and then into cell phones with the iPhone. It worked, and
made Apple into the biggest and richest tech company in the world.
Jeff Bezos is doing the same thing at Amazon.
About five years ago, Amazon noticed it had a lot of spare capacity
in its data centers that was only used during the holiday season. So it
started renting out some of that capacity to other companies. Now
hundreds of high-profile Internet startups, including big names like
Foursquare and Yelp, run their businesses on Amazon Web Services.
Somehow, an online bookseller became the most important provider of
"cloud computing" -- a fancy term for running other companies' online
services.
In 2007, Amazon introduced its electronic reader, the Kindle. The
product limped along for a couple of years, then started to take off in
2010 with the third generation.
But next month Amazon will unveil Kindle Fire, a color version that
is more like a full tablet computer, with an app store, music store,
video store, and new kind of Web browser designed to load Web pages faster. And it sells for $199, which is hundreds of dollars less than Apple's iPad. No wonder Amazon is having to build millions more than it expected to meet demand.
Somehow, an online bookseller could become one of the dominant players in tablet computing.
Bezos not only resembles Jobs in his business practices. He's also got a lot of the same personal traits.
He's a control freak
Google engineer Steve Yegge, who formerly worked at Amazon, accidentally published a post criticizing his current employer and praising Amazon and Bezos.
(The post was supposed to be for Google's eyes only.) He said Bezos was
a micromanager who "made ordinary control freaks look like stoned
hippies." A Portfolio.com profile in 2009
said Bezos wanted to know the details of every contract Amazon signed
and had to sign off on how he was quoted in every press release.
He doesn't like dissent
Bezos often tells employees that they're lucky to work at Amazon and
leaves sticky notes reminding them who's in charge if they disagree with
him, according to Yegge.
He has otherworldly smarts
In a follow-up post, Yegge explained how Bezos was so smart that
you could only impress him in presentations if you deleted every third
paragraph to keep his brain occupied -- and even then, he'd figure out
something you missed. "People like Jeff are better regarded as
hyper-intelligent aliens with a tangential interest in human affairs."
He always wanted to change the world
According to a 1999 profile in Wired,
a high school girlfriend says that Bezos wanted to make money from an
early age, but not to be rich -- he wanted to use the money to change
the future.
He is obsessed with secrecy
Some companies are like leaky sieves -- Hewlett-Packard can't keep an
internal secret to save its life, and Google and Facebook products leak
all the time. The tech press publishes all sorts of rumors about Apple,
but most of them turn out to be wrong because the company places a high
premium on secrecy. But Amazon is even more secretive than Apple.
He was born in hard circumstances
Jobs was born to a young mother out of wedlock and given up for
adoption. Bezos was born to a teenage mother whose marriage to his
biological father lasted little more than a year. (Bezos has his adopted
father's last name and considers him his real father, just as Jobs
considered his adoptive parents his real parents.)
To be sure, there are some major differences between the two men.
Jobs dropped out of liberal arts college Reed and bummed around for a
few years before figuring out what to do with his life; Bezos graduated
from Princeton and went straight to work on Wall Street. Jobs had a bit
of the California hippie in him, practicing Buddhism and trying natural
remedies to cure his cancer; Bezos is more of a classic computer
scientist, obsessed with space travel and mechanically adept.
Most important, Amazon hasn't yet created many products that inspire
the kind of love that the iPod, iPhone and iPad do. There aren't any
Amazon fans -- or at least they're nowhere near as obsessed as Apple's.
But give Bezos another five years and a few more new product areas, and that might change, too.
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