Jeff Bezos on Amazon's Anti-Wal-Mart Strategy

Wal-Mart's strategy is to sell what sells: high volume SKUs stay on the shelves, low volume SKUs are discontinued. In contrast, hard-to-find low-volume products are Amazon's bread-and-butter (and why I love Amazon.com). Check out this excerpt from Wired magazines interview with Jeff Bezos:

WIRED: Does Amazon actually create demand for hard-to-find products?

BEZOS: Absolutely. We not only help readers find books, we also help books find readers, with personalized recommendations based on the patterns we see. I remember one of the first times this struck me. The main book on the page was on Zen. There were other suggestions for Zen books, and in the middle of those was a book on how to have a clutter-free desk. That's not something that a human editor would have ever picked. But statistically, the people who were interested in the Zen books also wanted clutter-free desks. The computer is blind to the fact that these things are dissimilar in some way that's important to humans. It looks right through that and says yes, try this. And it works.

Read the rest of the interview.