Brad Stone Quotes

The difference between Amazon and us is Amazon is more like an empire - everything they control themselves, buy and sell.

Great businesses can be built on scale. I think Amazon has built a phenomenal commerce business largely on scale. Their network effect isn't obvious to me, but boy, have they used scale effectively.

Amazon has well passed any expectations of its ability to change distribution and marketing.

Amazon is a corporation, not a philanthropic trust dedicated to the production of works of art and literature.

When I came into the mobile phone business, I was really the upstart who pretty much took the business, not quite by storm, but really made an impact on it quite early on. But it was from a position, really, of feeling that I was a last mover.

To control the American market is to own America.

I think Amazon is the greatest start-up and the greatest company in the world. The way they are using new technologies is not just disrupting retail, it's getting ready to disrupt everything.

In Hong Kong, the property business has always been very competitive, so we have to think of ways to get an edge over our competitors.

Perhaps the single most dramatic example of this phenomenon of software eating a traditional business is the suicide of Borders and corresponding rise of Amazon.

You need to understand the market, know how you can differentiate yourself in it, and grasp the price and the functional differentiation competitive points that are going to allow you to be disruptive.

There are lots of retailers that are now scrambling to emulate the Amazon model, so Amazon does not have a monopoly on same-day distribution or broad selection or low prices. All that said, there are advantages that accrue to the largest player, so I don't see much in the way of Amazon slowing down.

Domination and monopoly is the name of the game in the web marketplace.

Amazon is a marvelous conglomeration and delivery system for products of every imaginable function. But the book 'business' is really not the same as the sale of lawn rakes or adapters for telephones.

It's really hard to run a business against somebody who is not acting as if it were in business.

We don't have a monopoly. We have market share. There's a difference.

The biggest part of our business has always been moving things, not paper. With the Internet, people in Mississippi can buy things from Macedonia, without regard to time or place or quantity.

Most companies in a capitalistic system compete mightily to obtain monopolistic positions so they can avoid capitalistic competition thereafter. Whenever a business person must compete for price, he tends to describe that derisively as a “commodity business” and tries to remedy the situation.

We’re far behind [Microsoft]. They are 3 time bigger than we are. They have a monopoly and we don’t—darnit!

Sometimes, for businesses, competition can be inconvenient, because competition means that the race is never over, the game is never won. No matter how well you were doing in the past, there's always someone who are out there wanting to take your place. So the temptation to avoid competition is powerful. It's rooted in motives as old as Adam and Eve: in greed for yet more money, in fear of losing your position in the market and all the benefits it brings.

I've never had difficulty dominating any market I've been in.

You can't be in a certain business and not sell to Amazon or not sell to Wal-Mart. You have to reckon with them, because even though there are other buyers, they're the only buyers that matter.

Competition is one of the most important drivers of innovation because you have to stay in the race. You have to think of something new, and if you don't, well, of course you should leave the market.

I think that Amazon made an incredible play with the Twitch purchase.

Competition matters.

Tomorrow I will have new competitors such as Google, Microsoft, and Facebook coming into my garden. I'd rather focus on the competition of tomorrow than combine with the competition of today.