Bezos didn't view Amazon an online bookstore. He deliberately went into books first because they take up a lot of space and have a long tail of interest, which made them ideal for internet distribution vs. physical distribution. It's pretty clear from what Bezos has said and written over the past 20 years that he had a decent idea of what he wanted to accomplish and has been gradually executing on that.

Based on the limited background information I've read about Bezos, this seems true, but can you explain what you mean in more detail? Just because it's interesting.

That 500 other people with the same idea would have just as well failed (and in fact, tons of people with the same idea did and do fail in most business attemps).

Prerequisites matter (having the money, VC connections), time matter (dot com golden era), place matters (USA vs say Kazakhstan), the overall economic trajectory matters, execution matters - heck, even luck at various different points on setting up the business matters more than the idea.

You must be one of those who think ideas are worthless because everybody has them

>You must be one of those who think ideas are worthless because everybody has them

Yes, one of those so-called realists.

If everybody has them but only 1 of everybody succeeds with the same idea, ideas [1] are obviously worthless.

[1] At the level under discussion, that is: "let's do a business doing X", because otherwise e.g. Relativity Theory is also an idea, and it's certainly not worthless.