AMAZON.COM

Amazon.com

[Institute Name]

Amazon.com

History

Amazon.com is one of the most well-known and successful Internet startup companies. Beginning as an online bookstore and expanding into other areas of online retail, Amazon.com pioneered several key features of online shopping, or what is now called e-commerce.

Amazon.com was founded in 1995 by Jeff Bezos. After doing research into the possibilities of Internet commerce, Bezos decided a bookseller was an ideal concept for an online retailer. While other industries had relatively successful mail-order businesses, mail-order books had always been difficult because of the sheer number of titles in print. A mail-order catalogue that even approached the number of books in print would have been about the size of an urban telephone book and too expensive to mail. Bezos took air journey from New York to Texas, where he selected up a vehicle from a family constituent, and then motored from Texas to Seattle. he business started as an online bookstore; while the biggest brick-and-mortar bookstores and mail-order catalogs for publications might offer 200,000 names, an online bookstore could offer more. Bezos entitled the business "Amazon" after the world's biggest river. Since 2000, Amazon's logotype is an projectile premier from A to Z, comprising clientele approval (as it types a smile); a aim was to have every merchandise in the alphabet. (Williamson, 2002)

Its Leadership

Jeff Bezos launched Internet mega-retailer Amazon.com in 1995. Amazon now has more name-brand recognition than Burger King, Wrigley's, or Barbie, according to Fortune magazine, and has customers in 150 countries. The company has made 38-year-old Bezos a multi-billionaire, and had industry-watchers proclaiming him an e-commerce visionary as recently as 1999. However, the rapid economic downturn of 2000 may have taken Bezos's hero status with it. (Quittner, 2001)

Bezos was born on January 12, 1964, in Albuquerque, New Mexico. As a child, he had an insatiable curiosity, especially about outer space; before long, he was expressing an interest in space travel—not as an astronaut, but as a colonizing entrepreneur. After his father took a job in Miami as an Exxon engineer, Bezos graduated high school as valedictorian, delivering an address that stressed the importance of outer-space colonization. Later, he attended Princeton University, graduating with majors in electrical engineering and computer science.

Bezos' first job was at a financial-markets networking start-up called Fitel, which had been launched by two Columbia University professors. He left there to join D.E. Shaw & Co., a hedge-fund investment management firm. There he met his future wife Mackenzie, an aspiring novelist who was working at Shaw as a researcher. (Krantz, 1999)

While at Shaw, Bezos' job was to discover profit-making opportunities for the company, and it was there that he discovered the opportunity that he would parlay into Amazon. In 1994, while surfing the World Wide Web, he came upon a site that claimed to track the Internet's growth. It showed that the Web was growing by 2,300 percent a year. Bezos had a flash of inspiration, realizing that his own entrepreneurial future lay in building a company on the Internet. (Hof, 2003)

His research indicated that his ...