At one of the early company All Hands meetings sometime during my time at Amazon (1997-2004), during employee Q&A for Jeff Bezos, someone asked him what change in the world might have the largest positive impact on Amazon's business (I don't remember the exact phrasing of the question, but it was along those lines).

I'll never forget his response, which seemed really strange to me at the time. He said the thing that would be the biggest game changer was an "always on computer." Kids these days may not remember this, but back then we all worked on laptops or desktops that booted Windows, and each time you turned a computer on it took a really long time before they were ready to use, on the order of minutes. My usual morning ritual at Amazon was to boot my computer and then go grab a drink from the break room to make use of the wait.

We were all highly attuned to any friction in the shopping process, but my mind gravitated to all the downstream pain points in ecommerce like shipping fees and delivery transit times. Bezos, as always, was already working far beyond that, thinking back upstream, to the near future.

With an always on computer, he explained, you could turn it on like a television or a light bulb and it would just be on, immediately, which might be possible if the computer was mostly running off of RAM (yes, this was the age before SSD's, which I guess he also saw coming). This would get more people online more often, growing the potential market for Amazon shoppers, who had to be online to access our store.

Of course, I think he'd even admit that he had no idea the "always on" computer would take the form of a smartphone connected to a cellular network. Not only do these computers turn on instantly, they're actually almost never off. What's more, they're not just always on but always connected.

I don't know if Amazon All-Hands meetings these days are still as interesting as they were in the old days, but I wish I had written down Jeff's response to the most interesting questions from the ones I attended. He dropped enough wisdom in those Q&A sessions to make for a succinct and brilliant business book.