Virginia Postrel kindly points us to an article by Brad Stone on Amazon that starts with the new Kindle tablet before offering a broader take on the company’s strengths:

“Amazon is not a fight-on-their-knees kind of company,” says Rob Glaser, the Seattle-based entrepreneur behind RealNetworks and now also a venture -capitalist at Accel Partners. “Jeff’s a hyper competitor.”
As its rivals steadily asphyxiate, Amazon is ringing up 50 percent growth in quarterly revenues, and may reach $50 billion in sales this year.
Wal-Mart needed almost twice the time — 33 years — to cross that threshold.
“Amazon is such a smart learning organization,” says Nancy F. Koehn, a professor of business administration at Harvard Business School. “It’s like a biological organism that through natural selection and adaptation just keeps learning and growing.”
Amazon is also facing a new kind of challenge that competitors like Wal-Mart are intimately familiar with — cultural backlash, or at least the early signs of it. The company has been criticized for waging an expensive state-by- state battle to avoid collecting sales taxes, and more recently for skimping on air conditioning in its East Coast distribution centers during a brutally hot summer.

The Kindle represented Amazon’s decision to disrupt its own business, and it has already paid dividends:

Bezos says tablets “are a huge tailwind for our business.”
Amazon once saw spikes in traffic during the workday lunch hours. Now traffic is more evenly distributed as people pick up their tablets anytime of the week, buying the books and albums they see on television and making impulsive decisions about replacing their dishwashers.
The Kindle Fire (internal code name: Otter) is designed to ensure that even more of those purchases go to Amazon.

And Kindle Fire will benefit from another Amazon strength, namely its investment in cloud computing:

Amazon saves money on the Kindle Fire by packing it with only eight gigabytes of memory (the costliest version of the iPad has 64 gigs), but owners of the device get to store as many books, songs, movies, and personal documents on Amazon’s cloud servers as they like for free.
Bezos won’t say whether he thinks he’ll lose money on the device itself, only that he’s at ease flirting with red ink.
“Certainly this is a for-profit business,” he says. “Let’s put it this way. We are and always have been very comfortable at operating at extremely low margins.”

It’s been said recently that Bezos is the only entrepreneur with the stature to fill Steve Jobs’s shoes as a polarizing cultural and intellectual figure. I’d argue that this understates the likely extent of his future influence.