Comment by alganet
19 days ago
You can design something in such a way that the most important and relevant piece of the solution comes later. The order doesn't matter.
Amazon is full of zombocominess. It's not a bad thing. The name itself is very zombo, _it can be anything_.
The book selling is a great MVP for their final goal, a huge wide ass platform. It's all over the company history (what they bought, how the grew).
You can design stuff in all kinds of weird ways. The first iPhone was a zombomachine. It had everything: it was a phone, it was an ipod, it was an internet device, it was a platform...
Platforms are awesome and if you have the resources you should totally build with one in mind.
The zeroth iPhone only played music btw
The first widespread portable music player, the Sony Walkman TPS-L2, was in fact a modified recorder that had a platform for audio that punched above its weight.