https://blog.aboutamazon.com/company-news/2018-letter-to-sha...
> Failure needs to scale too
> As a company grows, everything needs to scale, including the size of your failed experiments. 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. Amazon will be experimenting at the right scale for a company of our size if we occasionally have multibillion-dollar failures. Of course, we won’t undertake such experiments cavalierly. We will work hard to make them good bets, but not all good bets will ultimately pay out. This kind of large-scale risk taking is part of the service we as a large company can provide to our customers and to society. The good news for shareowners is that a single big winning bet can more than cover the cost of many losers.
> Development of the Fire phone and Echo was started around the same time. While the Fire phone was a failure, we were able to take our learnings (as well as the developers) and accelerate our efforts building Echo and Alexa. The vision for Echo and Alexa was inspired by the Star Trek computer. The idea also had origins in two other arenas where we’d been building and wandering for years: machine learning and the cloud. From Amazon’s early days, machine learning was an essential part of our product recommendations, and AWS gave us a front row seat to the capabilities of the cloud. After many years of development, Echo debuted in 2014, powered by Alexa, who lives in the AWS cloud.
> No customer was asking for Echo. This was definitely us wandering. Market research doesn’t help. If you had gone to a customer in 2013 and said “Would you like a black, always-on cylinder in your kitchen about the size of a Pringles can that you can talk to and ask questions, that also turns on your lights and plays music?” I guarantee you they’d have looked at you strangely and said “No, thank you.”
> Since that first-generation Echo, customers have purchased more than 100 million Alexa-enabled devices.
One of the things I like and value about Amazon is its focus on long-term thinking, willingness to make big bets (Echo, Just-Walk-Out retail stores aka Amazon Go stores), and generally a willingness to be misunderstood for long periods of time (i.e., you have you believe in your own vision and ignore what competitors are doing and haters are saying).
On a personal basis, my guiding light is designing products that I'd want to use myself, with the premise that there are enough other people out there like me; this has served me well several times in guiding my own individual innovation or research.
That being said, I agree with you about the specific products you mentioned, like Wave. It feels like products like Wave were killed prematurely, before the industry had the chance to wrap its collective brain around the ideas it embodied. With a better UI and product documentation, Google could have built a product that took on the role of Slack or was even better, and years earlier. I think what actually killed Wave was an insufficient focus on making the UI really slick. It may have been too early for its time, needing some of the Internet technologies that were invented later.
