“Amazon is legendary for its thin profit margins, but there’s a method to the company’s madness, as detailed in Brad Stone’s new book, The Everything Store,” Todd Bishop reports for GeekWire. “Part of it is that Jeff Bezos wants to avoid repeating what he considers ‘Steve Jobs’ mistake’ in pricing products.”
“At one point, Bezos explained to one of Amazon’s major shareholders that he wanted to avoid ‘Steve Jobs’ mistake’ of pricing the iPhone so high that it created fantastic profit margins,” Bishop reports. “The problem, Bezos explained, was that the strategy attracted a raft of competitors as a result.”
Bishop reports, “Stone tells the story of one former Apple executive, Diego Piacentini, who left to join Amazon around 2001. Jobs asked the executive why he wanted to work for a ‘boring retailer’ when Apple was in the process of ‘reinventing computing.’ Stone writes, ‘Then in the same breath, Jobs suggested that maybe the career move revealed that Piacentini was so dumb that it was a good thing he was leaving Apple.'”
Read more in the full article here.
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