It's always worth asking, do we own the process or does the process own us? In a Day 2 company, you might find it's the second.

Most big technology companies are competitor focused. They see what others are doing, and then work to fast follow. In contrast, 90 to 95 percent of what we build in AWS is driven by what customers tell us they want.

We've done price elasticity studies, and the answer is always that we should raise prices. We don't do that because we believe, and we have to take this as an article of faith, that by keeping our prices very, very low, we earn trust with customers over time, and that actually does maximize free cash flow over the long term.

If we can arrange things in such a way that our interests are aligned with our customers, then in the long term that will work out really well for customers and it will work out really well for Amazon.

Focus on cost improvement makes it possible for us to afford lower prices, which drives growth. Growth spreads fixed costs across more sales, reducing cost per unit, which makes possible more price reductions. Customers like this, and it's good for shareholders. Please expect us to repeat this loop.

One of the things we don't do very well at Amazon is a me-too product offering. So when I look at physical retail stores, it's very well served, the people who operate physical retail stores are very good at it...the question we would always have before we would embark on such a thing is: What's the idea? What would we do that would be different? How would it be better? We don't want to just do things because we can do them...we don't want to be redundant.