There are corners of Amazon that are the result of clever people squeezing the numbers as hard as they can and turning coal into diamonds (and making their hands achey and black). There are other corners of Amazon that are the result of Jeff Bezos demanding things. There's a bit in The Everything Store where they're talking about the design of the Kindle. Super-secret, nobody talk about it, rootin'tootin'hifalootin' designers from Germany and it's this beautiful e-ink thing that's light and thin and glorious and Jeff Bezos hates it because it doesn't have a keyboard. Well of course it doesn't have a keyboard, asshole, it's a reader, said the designers but no, Bezos insisted that customers needed to be able to buy Kindle books from a goddamn Kindle and to do that they either needed a touch screen which didn't work with the refresh rates or they needed a fucking keyboard and 3G and he was such a dick about it that the designers walked and the world got