The Long-Hauler

In the 1975 Bollywood classic “Deewar”, there is great scene (one of many great scenes) where a smuggler named Daawar is getting his shoe polished by a kid on the street (who grows up to be the indomitable, albeit misguided Amitabh Bachan). After the shoes are shined, Dawar throws a couple of rupees to the kid, but the ‘angry young kid’ refuses to accept it saying “may phainke hoay paisay nahee uthata”. This is roughly translated to “I refuse to accept money that is thrown”.

Daavar is super impressed, hands the money to the kid and comments to his smuggler companion “ye larka lambi race ka ghoda hay”.  This is loosely translated to “Watch out for this kid.  He’s in it for the long-haul and he’s going to be super successful”.  Now that I’ve butchered the translation, let me make clear that this post is not about the movie, the dynamic Big Bachan (who does become super successful in the movie and otherwise) or the smuggler.

This post is about Jeff Bezos, the CEO of Amazon. And he in my opinion is our modern day “lambi race ka ghoda”.

One of the few survivors of the .com bust, Jeff has led Amazon to amazing success.  Starting with just selling books online, it has become the online retailer of choice for almost everything under the sun.  Consider this, I’ve bought by TV from Amazon as well as Carbon’s famous Waffle flour.  Amazon also facilitates customer-to-customer transactions, is one of the top 3 web services providers, and over the past couple of years, is an emerging force in the consumer hardware space.  Kindles are the best selling e-readers in the market and Amazon is really to be credited with exploding adoption of e-books.

A lot of companies are now mimicking Apple’s strategy with respect to product announcements but fall short of the fit and finish of a Cupertino staged event.  The message is either all over the place and more ofthen than not, there are mum on pricing and or availability. But if there is one company really doing a kick-ass job of building anticipation for its events and delivering a compelling and cohesive message in its presentation, its Amazon.  Four weeks ago, while I was watching the most recent Amazon event where Jeff was unveiling the new Kindle Fire, my wife happened to walk by and asked if Apple had just unveiled the much rumored iPad mini.  I made fun of her for not knowing the difference between the Kindle and the iPad mini and not recognizing Jeff.

Later, I realized that she had unknowingly cemented my opinion about the event being Apple-esque in its execution.  It was in all seriousness, a very honest mistake.

One of my favorite bloggers, John Gruber had an excellent post about the event and Amazon’s strategy compared to Apple.

Another great piece on Amazon’s long term strategy is a NYT article published in Dec 2011 (see excerpt below):

In 1997, the year Amazon.com went public, its chief executive, Jeff Bezos, issued a manifesto: “It’s all about the long term,” he said. He warned shareholders “we may make decisions and weigh tradeoffs differently than some companies” and urged them to make sure that a long-term approach “is consistent with your investment policy.” Amazon’s management and employees “are working to build something important, something that matters to our customers, something that we can tell our grandchildren about,”

Here’s a beauty of a post from Farhad Manjoo discussing Amazon’s aggressive distribution strategy.

Parting thought to nervous Amazon shareholders and tech pundits who are bearish on Amazon.

You don’t wanna bet against Jeff Bezos…