I think anyone who has any idea what goes on inside Amazon, coupled with shopping on Amazon's store, knows that it is both strategy and technology that fuel its progress. In short: equal parts engineering and business skills.

eBooks are the engineering afterthought that careful business planning brought to fruition. Amazon never set out as a business to upset the book industry, just like Apple/Google never set out as a business to upset the mobile handset industry.

I see many plays Amazon has made as a sort of hydra start-up company. Take a piece of technology: how can we turn this into a business nobody has tapped into? How can we use pre-existing models that work well to push our form further?

I remember years ago when Amazon was bringing its clusters into the grid-computing-for-pay arena, now known as "cloud computing services". I thought it was kind of a joke; they had too many servers and needed a way to pay for it all. Turns out they found repeat customers.

I remember when people started telling me they bought all their books on Amazon, and tons more of them since they were so cheap. I thought, oh great, a book wholesaler; probably not the same thing as getting the newest books quickly and at a competitive price. Turns out when you own the entire process of putting words to eyes it becomes a pretty good repeat business.

I don't think the execs of Amazon live in a bubble. I think they share information and work toward solutions like engineers do. That isn't to say they aren't vulnerable of classic business blunders, but if their corporate culture remains one of vision AND simple problem-solving they might just accomplish some more monumental feats - all the while staying in the black.