Experimentation is at Amazon’s core. Culturally what it means is that “ideas” are not judged out of hand by those “in the know” but based on evidence. Nothing is bad, just untested.

Also a good point around the shopping aspects Amazon doesn’t do well as they do not focus much on shopping experience: “can it work out how to let us shop, rather than just buy?”

I sometimes think that if you could look in the safe behind Jeff Bezos’s desk, instead of the sports almanac from Back to the Future, you’d find an Encyclopedia of Retail, written in maybe 1985. There would be Post-It notes on every page, and every one of those notes has been turned into a team or maybe a product.

Amazon is so new, and so dramatic in its speed and scale and aggression, that we can easily forget how many of the things it’s doing are actually very old. And, we can forget how many of the slightly dusty incumbent retailers we all grew up with were also once radical, daring, piratical new businesses that made people angry with their new ideas.

https://www.ben-evans.com/benedictevans/2019/7/26/amazon-as-experiment