AP/Ted S. Warren
- Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos has called the e-commerce giant "the best place in the world to fail."
- He has famously instituted a culture in which failure is an acceptable — even necessary — part of doing business.
- That said, Amazon has had some spectacular failures over the years, resulting in billions of dollars in mistakes, according to Bezos.
- "If the size of your failures isn’t growing, you’re not going to be inventing at a size that can actually move the needle," he wrote in his annual letter to shareholders in April.
- Visit Business Insider’s homepage for more stories.
Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos famously called the e-commerce giant "the best place in the world to fail" in his 2016 shareholder letter.
"What really matters is, companies that don’t continue to experiment, companies that don’t embrace failure, they eventually get in a desperate position where the only thing they can do is a Hail Mary bet at the very end of their corporate existence," Bezos told Business Insider’s Henry Blodget in a 2014 interview.
Amazon’s most successful initiatives would never have happened without some element of risk.
"I’ve made billions of dollars of failures at Amazon.com. Literally billions of dollars of failures," Bezos told Blodget. "None of those things are fun. But they also don’t matter."
And the size of those failures should only be growing, Bezos said in his 2018 letter to shareholders in April.
"If the size of your failures isn’t growing, you’re not going to be inventing at a size that can actually move the needle," he wrote. "Amazon will be experimenting at the right scale for a company of our size if we occasionally have multibillion-dollar failures."
We’ve catalogued some of Amazon’s more high-profile failures through the years. This is by no means an exhaustive list, but it offers a taste of Amazon’s culture of failure.
Amazon Spark
Amazon
Amazon launched its Instagram-like visual shopping platform, Amazon Spark, in 2017.
The idea was that customers would browse a photo-heavy feed, with products featured in the photographs, as a new way to shop and discover the huge array of items sold on Amazon.com.
Amazon shut down the project in mid-2019, and the page now redirects to the #FoundItOnAmazon site.
"Spark is not gone entirely, we’ve pivoted and narrowed the experience based on what resonated with customers," a spokesperson for Amazon told Business Insider‘s Mary Hanbury.
Amazon Restaurants
Amazon
On June 11, Amazon told Geekwire in an email that its Amazon Restaurants service would be shutting down.
First launched in 2015, the service delivered freshly prepared food from local restaurants to customers via Amazon’s same-day delivery network, which it also uses for Prime Now deliveries. It later expanded to 20 US cities and London before its demise.
In London, the service launched in 2016 and stopped in late 2018.
The last day of the service in the US will be June 24.
Amazon Storywriter
Amazon Screenshot
On May 4, Amazon sent an email to users saying that it would be shutting down its Amazon Storywriter and Amazon Storybuilder features, effective June 30.
Combined, the services enabled TV and film writers to easily create scripts, which could then be submitted directly to Amazon Studios for consideration. It previously shut down the script submission program in 2018, putting the future of Storybuilder and Storywriter into question.
See the rest of the story at Business Insider
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Source: Business Insider – dgreen@businessinsider.com (Dennis Green)