One of the key reasons Amazon (NASDAQ:AMZN) stock is one of the most valuable on Wall Street -- with a market cap of $884 billion -- is that the company is willing to take bold initiatives. True, sometimes things fall short, as seen with the move into the smartphone business. But for the most part, CEO Jeff Bezos has been able to make the right strategic decisions and deploy resources in a disciplined way. Perhaps the best example of this is AWS (Amazon Web Services). Without this, AMZN stock would likely have a much lower valuation today. The irony is that the company was not the ideal player to be the winner in the cloud.