What is that I like about Amazon.com ?

Aside from the fact Amazon is my employer, there are a lot of things that I love and learnt about Amazon.

Great customer service. Amazon is so customer experience focused and focuses on fairness.

Great Management. Jeff Bezos is very hands on and always focused on the long term growth of the company. He comes across as a very grounded person, irrespective of how Wall Street perceives the company, he's always investing for future growth of the company.

Frugality. As an employee, it does bug me me how frugal the company is. We dont have a well stocked pantry.. not the latest laptop.. some companies pay for the use of your personal phone for office use etc. I am not a frugal person in my personal life .. so you can see why this bugs me. So, why do I still like frugality of Amazon ?. Amazon builds home grown products.. hires the smartest engineers and builds its own products. It will be a tough sell to ask Amazon to buy another company. If you go with such a proposal, they will ask you to build the product yourself. That doesnt mean Amazon does not buy other companies. Amazon does buys but many a times, doesnt totally integrate under Amazon flagship. Those companies run fairly independently. Amazon hardly shells out money for marketing. Marketing is in the form of free shipping for orders >25$ and prime program .. highly targetted spending that will promote customer experience and brand loyalty.

Time to market. This is not meant to bash any major company. One thing that bothered me about Microsoft.. they had this Microsoft surface technology in their hands long before Apple. They were so focused on making the product complete and thought too highly about the product that they kept postponing its release. Microsoft has business in all markets like Mobile, music player, what not. How much time will it take to promote the use of a new technology across all areas?. Not many in the market has seen the MS Surface as a product yet. They could have made 10 times more money with this technology as Apple made with the Iphones. The difference is where the focus is. Microsoft is more developer centric... Apple is more sales centric.

Execution and follow through. Best examples are EC2, S3 and other webservices. I thought Amazon is trying an area which was cool but not really a lucrative area when they started it. Now, I see the difference between other companies that tried this before Amazon and Amazon. The difference lies in the execution. Amazon is very result oriented.. less talk and more work and focus on customer experience.

It is easy to move around the company and learn a lot. You can talk to people across the company and learn a lot about whats going on. Company all hands meetings are great eye openers. You get to know a lot about the stuff that is being built in the company.

No wonder, I've seen many ex-Amazonians turn into entrepreneurs. Amazon itself has lots of entrepreneurs turned into employees.. such people have better strategic vision and tend to keep the big picture in mind while working on their part.