Video2003

TED2003: ‘The electricity metaphor for the web’s future’

Bezos argues that the dot-com boom and bust was not a gold rush that is over but the equivalent of the early electricity industry: the ‘appliances’ that will make the web useful have barely been invented.

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Around this recording

The recordings either side of it, in order.

All 70 recordings of Jeff Bezos →

2000
‘Vision for Amazon’ — 50-minute interview
A nearly hour-long 2000 interview in which Bezos lays out Amazon’s mission and long-term ambitions at the moment the dot-com bubble was deflating. The uploader does not identify the original broadcaster; it may be a program or conference recording.
2001
Newsweek On Air: ‘The Amazon Mystery’
A radio interview from April 2001 — the nadir of Amazon’s stock and reputation — in which Bezos, billed as ‘Chairman of the Board, Amazon.com’, is questioned alongside technology writer Steven Levy about whether the company can survive and reach profitability.
2001
Academy of Achievement interview
The fullest early account of Bezos’s life in his own words: growing up with his grandfather on the Cotulla ranch, Princeton, D. E. Shaw, the ‘regret minimization framework’ that made him leave Wall Street, the drive west, the garage and the Cadabra/‘cadaver’ name mix-up, and surviving the dot-com crash.
2001
Charlie Rose: the founding of Amazon and the company today
Bezos returns to Rose a year into the crash to retell the founding story and argue that Amazon is a real business, not a bubble artifact, as it pushes toward its promised first profit.
2002
TechTV interview clips
Two short interview clips with Bezos from the cable channel TechTV, preserved in a 2013 dump of G4TV.com’s video archive, in which he discusses the future of Amazon. The original air date is not recorded.
2002
MIT talk: ‘Earth’s Most Customer-Centric Company — Differentiating with Technology’
A technical talk given in the first weeks of Amazon’s turn to profitability: Bezos recounts the company’s first 30 days, the original home page and why he chose Seattle, then explains personalization, A/B testing and fulfillment optimization, and introduces the original Amazon Web Services program (the 2002 product-data API) with a demo by its manager Robert Frederick, before taking audience questions on pricing experiments, competitors and shipping costs.
2003
TED2003: ‘The electricity metaphor for the web’s future’
Bezos argues that the dot-com boom and bust was not a gold rush that is over but the equivalent of the early electricity industry: the ‘appliances’ that will make the web useful have barely been invented.
2006
EmTech keynote: ‘We build muck so you don’t have to’
Bezos’s first big public pitch for Amazon Web Services: after laying out Amazon’s scale — 59 million active customers, 35 product categories, 1.08 million seller accounts, 10.2 million square feet of fulfillment space and about $2 billion invested in its technology — he argues that the web has removed shelf space as the barrier for software entrepreneurs and that the new barrier is the back-end ‘muck’ that eats 70 percent of developers’ time, which Amazon will now rent out as S3, EC2 and Mechanical Turk.
2007
Charlie Rose: the Kindle
Hours after unveiling the Kindle, Bezos sits with Rose for a full hour to explain why Amazon built hardware, how the wireless store works, and why he thinks the book is the last analog bastion worth digitizing. The interview became the long-form companion to the launch.
2007
Kindle launch press event
Bezos took the stage at 9:41 a.m. with a tablet, a papyrus scroll and a picture of Gutenberg to argue that the book is a ‘500-year-old technology’ that ‘disappears when you read it’, then unveiled the 10.3-ounce Kindle with free Whispernet wireless delivery over Sprint’s network, 90,000 titles, bestsellers at $9.99 and a $399 price, demonstrating font resizing, dictionary look-up and the store before rolling a promotional video.
2007
NPR All Things Considered: ‘Amazon Rolls Out New Wireless Reading Device’
On the evening of the Kindle launch, Bezos tells NPR’s Michele Norris why electronic ink and built-in wireless make the $399 device different from ‘a long history of failed reading devices’, that new releases will cost $9.99 against $25 hardcovers, that the device took three years to build, and that ‘we were never going to out-book the book’.
2008
Fortune Brainstorm Tech on-stage interview
Two excerpts from Bezos’s session at Fortune’s 2008 Brainstorm Tech conference: in one he discusses Amazon’s strategy and, unusually for the time, his plans to build a commercial spaceship at Blue Origin; in the other, the first months of the Kindle and the future of reading.
2008
The Oprah Winfrey Show: Oprah’s ‘favorite new gadget’
Oprah Winfrey devotes a segment to the Kindle as her ‘favorite new gadget’ and brings on Bezos to explain the device, giving it the mainstream push that preceded the Kindle 2; Amazon emailed customers in advance to announce his appearance.