“What really matters is, companies that don’t continue to experiment, companies that don’t embrace failure, they eventually get in a desperate position where the only thing they can do is a Hail Mary bet at the very end of their corporate existence,” Bezos said.
CBS
That doesn’t mean companies should make bets that could risk the whole company’s existence, Bezos continued. “Companies that are making bets all along, even big bets — but not bet-the-company bets — prevail. I don’t believe in bet-the-company bets. That’s when you’re desperate. That’s the last thing you can do,” he said.
REUTERS/Las Vegas Sun/Steve Marcus
Amazon is now worth $260 billion. It made almost $90 billion in revenue last year alone. But if it weren’t for these failed projects, Amazon may not be where it is today...
Phil Noble / REUTERS
Amazon announced in March that it would shut down Amazon Webstore, its e-commerce platform that competed with Shopify and Bigcommerce. It’s keeping the service alive until July 2016 to let existing users to find a new vendor.
In 2012, Amazon shut down Endless.com, a high-end fashion commerce site, and moved it under amazon.com/fashion. It still owns other non-Amazon-branded fashion sites like Zappos and Shopbop.
Last year, Amazon shut its peer-to-peer payment service called WebPay, which allowed users to send and receive money from each other. The service was similar to Paypal, but failed to gain much traction.
Amazon also launched a service called PayPhrase in 2009, but shut it down three years later. PayPhrase let users checkout quickly by just typing in a pre-stored “phrase” and an accompanying PIN number as a replacement for an ID/password combination, but failed to catch on.
Amazon pulled the plug on its own Q&A site called Askville in 2013, nearly 7 years after making it public. The site was cofounded by Joseph Park, the cofounder of Kozmo.com.
Amazon once had an auction site called Amazon Auction, which went head-to-head with eBay. Auction shut down eventually, but it helped Amazon launch its own online marketplace for third party vendors called Amazon Marketplace, which is now a big part of its overall business.
Amazon briefly sold its own premium line of diapers, but discontinued the service after just a couple months earlier this year. But Amazon said it’s “making design improvements,” so it might bring the diapers back eventually.
Amazon’s first smartphone, the Fire Phone, hasn’t been discontinued, but it’s been a pretty big flop so far. Amazon wrote off $170 million worth of unsold Fire Phones last year, and its hardware division has been cutting jobs recently.
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Eugene is Business Insider’s Chief Tech Correspondent, where he leads coverage of Amazon. His reporting spans the company’s retail and logistics operations to AWS, Alexa, and its internal culture.Previously, he worked at CNBC, Fortune Magazine Korea, and Japan's Yomiuri Shimbun. He holds degrees from NYU and Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism.In 2022, Eugene reported on internal documents indicating that Amazon allegedly used deceptive tactics to enroll customers in Prime and made cancellation difficult. The Federal Trade Commission sued Amazon the following year, citing his reporting. The case ended in a record $2.5 billion settlement in 2025.His work has received multiple honors, including the SF Press Club’s Bay Area Journalism Award and SPJ NorCal’s Excellence in Journalism Award.Eugene lives in the Bay Area. Contact him via email at ekim@jkmperu.com, or Signal, Telegram, or WhatsApp at 650-942-3061. Use a personal email address, a nonwork WiFi network, and a nonwork device; here's our guide to sharing information securely.
