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  3. Jeff Bezos Taking the long view A)Jeff Bezos, the founder and chief executive of Amazon, owes much of his success to his ability

Jeff Bezos Taking the long view A)Jeff Bezos, the founder and chief executive of Amazon, owes much of his success to his ability

admin2015-01-31  60
问题                      Jeff Bezos Taking the long view
A)Jeff Bezos, the founder and chief executive of Amazon, owes much of his success to his ability to look beyond the short-term view of things.
B)Inside a remote mountain in Texas, a huge clock is being pieced together, capable of telling the time for the next 10,000 years. Once the clock is finished, people willing to make the difficult trek will be able to visit the vast chamber housing it, along with displays marking various anniversaries of its operation. On a website set up to track the progress of this "10,000-year clock", Jeff Bezos, who has invested $42m of his own money in the project, describes this impressive feat of engineering as "an icon for long-term thinking".
C)That description applies just as much to Mr Bezos himself. The founder and chief executive of Amazon has often ruffled investors’ feathers by sacrificing short-term profits to make big bets on new technologies that, he insists, will produce richer returns for the company’ s shareholders in future.
D)Some of these gambles have paid off handsomely. They have also enhanced Mr Bezos’s reputation as a technological seer(先知). "In the last few years there has been a re-acceleration of the rate of change in technology," he says. His impressive ability to identify and profit from the resulting disruptions means he is widely seen as the person best placed to fill the shoes of the late Steve Jobs as the industry’ s leading visionary.
E)Mr Bezos’ s willingness to take a long-term view also explains his fascination with space travel, and his decision to found a secretive company called Blue Origin, one of several start-ups now building spacecraft with private funding. It might seem like a risky bet, but the same was said of many of Amazon’ s unusual moves in the past. Successful firms, he says, tend to be the ones that are willing to explore uncharted territories.
F)Eyebrows were raised, for example, when Amazon moved into the business of providing cloud-computing services to technology firms—which seemed an odd choice for an online retailer.
G)But the company has since established itself as a leader in the field. "A big piece of the story we tell ourselves about who we are is that we are willing to invent," Mr Bezos told shareholders at Amazon’ s annual meeting last year. "And very importantly, we are willing to be misunderstood for long periods of time."
The view from the garage
H)Amazon’s culture has been deeply influenced by Mr Bezos’s own experiences. A computer-science graduate from Princeton, he returned to his alma mater last year to give a speech to students that provided some fascinating insights into his psychology as an entrepreneur.
I)He explained that he had been a "garage inventor" from a young age. His creations included a solar cooker made out of an umbrella and tin foil, which did not work very well, and an automatic gate-closer made out of cement-filled tyres.
J)That passion for invention has not deserted Mr Bezos, who last year filed a patent(专利)for a system of tiny airbags that can be incorporated into smartphones, to prevent them from being damaged if dropped. Even so, in the 1990s he hesitated to leave a good job in the world of finance to set up Amazon after a colleague he respected advised him against it. But Mr Bezos applied what he calls a "regret minimisation framework", imagining whether, as an 80-year-old looking back, he would regret the decision not to strike out on his own. He concluded that he would, and with encouragement from his wife he took the plunge as an entrepreneur. They moved from New York to Seattle and he founded the company, in time-honoured fashion for American technology start-ups, in his garage.
K)This may explain why Mr Bezos is so keen to ensure that Amazon preserves its own appetite for risk-taking. As companies grow, there is a danger that novel ideas get snuffed out by managers’ desire to conform and play it safe. "You get social cohesion at the expense of truth," he says. He believes that the best way to guard against this is for leaders to encourage their staff to work on big new ideas. "It’s like exercising muscles," he adds. "Either you use them or you lose them."
L)Mr Bezos doesn’t tell where he might place more big bets in future, but there have been persistent rumours that Amazon might launch a smartphone, possibly as soon as this year. With Amazon’ s video-streaming and music services, Mr Bezos clearly has Netflix and Apple in his sights. And in recent weeks there has been speculation that Amazon is toying with the idea of opening a bricks-and-mortar shop to promote sales of the Kindle, by letting customers try it in person. The success of Apple’s hugely profitable chain of retail stores shows that even in the era of e-commerce, there are some things people prefer to buy the old-fashioned way.
Keeping it simple
M)During the design of the original Kindle, for example, Mr Bezos insisted that the e-reader had to work without needing to be plugged into a PC. That meant giving it wireless connectivity. But he also wanted it to work everywhere, not just in Wi-Fi hotspots, and without the need for a monthly contract. This prompted the Kindle team to devise a new business model, striking deals with mobile-phone operators to allow Kindle users to download e-books without having to pay network fees. The ability to download books anywhere does not simply make life easier for users; it also encourages them to buy more books. The Kindle is an e-reader, but it is also a portable bookshop.
N)Not all of his bets succeed. Who remembers Amazon Auctions, for example, or Amapedia, Amazon’s attempt to build a Wikipedia-like user-generated product directory? Even more numerous are the bets that Mr Bezos has placed on new initiatives that have yet to prove their worth. Amazon has branched out into own-brand products, has set up specialist e-commerce sites and is dabbling in movie making and television production.
O)Staying on top in the fast-changing world of technology is hard, too. Mr Bezos is bound to be the target of more criticism as his company’ s huge investments in new areas continue to put a dent in its bottom line. His next move could be into smart phones or a video-streaming service that competes with Netflix, but it is just as likely to be something entirely unexpected. By being unusually patient, he hopes to create businesses that rivals will find harder to assail. As the investments in both Blue Origin and the 10,000-year clock show, it is the challenge of reaching for distant horizons that really makes Amazon’ s boss tick.
Though Mr Bezos keep his next big bet as a secret, there are many rumours and people predict that he will launch a smart phone very soon.
选项
答案L
解析 此句意为：尽管贝佐斯先生对他下一个大赌注只字不提，但是有传言称他不久就会发行一部智能手机。根据题干中的launch a smart phone可以定位到L段中的Mr．Bezos doesn’t tell where he might place more big bets in future，but there have been persistent rumours that Amazon might launch a smart phone，possibly as soon asthis year．题干中的keep his next big bet as a secret与doesn’t tell where he might place more big bets表达的意思相同。
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