Portfolio has an excerpt of a Puget Sound Business Journal profile of Jeff Bezos. PSBJ named Bezos Executive of the Year. Of course, Bezos declined to be interviewed and no other Amazon executives would talk to the magazine, but it still hints at some interesting stuff.
And the L.A. Times somehow managed to score an interview with Amazon’s Kindle chief, Russ Grandinetti. It’s a rare look inside the company, even though Grandinetti does mostly parrot the company line:
What’s Amazon’s purpose with Kindle?
Our vision is [to make] every book ever written, in any language, in print or out of print, all available within 60 seconds. And we want to make the customer experience great.
Some folks are irked that they can’t easily transfer digital books they bought elsewhere into their Kindles. Why did you choose a proprietary technology?
We chose a format that we felt would give us better performance and superior ease of use. It’s the reason why the Kindle has faster page turns than some of the other devices. Because we control our own standard, we can develop applications that let customers read Kindle books on the iPhone, Android tablet, iPad, BlackBerrys and PC.
I love how corporate whores simply refuse to answer questions. That second question could have been more simply answered by Amazon as FUCK YOU!!!
He was aked why they chose a proprietary technology and he gave an explanation for why they did. It may be bullshit, it may not be an answer you like, but he still answered the question.
Right, OuterCow. He answered the question. And it is a bullshit answer. I own a Kindle, and I love the device. But if I had it to do over again, I’d buy an e-Reader that supports open standards, even at the cost of marginally slower page-turns.
The tacit suggestion that the adoption of the EPUB standard would have complicated the implementation of software for various platforms is risible.
What a dumb fucking question. For starters, the Nook wasn’t released until 2 years after the Kindle, the iPad and Android Tablets weren’t released until a year after that. While the iPhone was released several months before Kindle, nobody with an IQ higher than their chronological age would read a book on a phone, and do you really think Jobs would have licensed it to Amazon? I don’t think I need to explain why Amazon would choose not to use some crippled windows platform.
Way to sneak in the year’s stupidest question, Alex Pham.
Portals are dead.
Yahoo, MS, even Google go down.
His answer sounds stock, and Kindle technology is exactly as proprietary as you’d expect it to be. What was anyone expecting? For Bezos to rip off his rubber mask and say “darn meddling interviewer! I wanted to make all the money that I could I my little toy, and you had to ruin it with all your questions! Meh!”