REVIEW: One Click: Jeff Bezos and the Rise of Amazon.com
By Chris Sorensen - Wednesday, November 16, 2011 - 0 Comments
Book by Richard L. Brandt
Amid the flood of tributes to the late Apple co-founder Steve Jobs, it might seem like an unfortunate time to come out with a book about Jeff Bezos and his online retailing giant, Amazon.com. But in some ways, Bezos’s achievements are just as impressive, and perhaps more instructive for would-be entrepreneurs. For one thing, Amazon is one of the few dot-com companies that not only survived the tech crash, but cleverly reinvented themselves over the years. Named for the mighty river, Amazon began in 1995 by selling only books, and quickly expanded to everything from appliances to patio furniture. Amazon was also among the first to achieve success in tablet computers with the 2007 release of its Kindle e-reader, and is becoming a major player in streaming media and cloud computing, taking on companies like Google, Netflix and Apple in the process.
Brandt details Bezos’s early days in the financial services industry, and the entrepreneurial drive that led him to create what he dubbed the “world’s largest bookstore,” even though Amazon initially stocked fewer titles than most neighbourhood shops. Like Jobs, Bezos is frequently described as “brilliant” and maniacally devoted to providing the best possible customer experience (people initially thought he was crazy for allowing negative book reviews on the site), although he comes across as less of a dreamer and more of a methodical empire builder. Bezos chose books because they offered the greatest Internet potential in the mid-1990s, when people were still wary of conducting transactions on the Internet. Books, he reasoned, had widespread appeal, were easy to ship, and lent themselves to being searched on a website (and titles already had a unique ISBN number, making it relatively easy to create a database).
Yet, despite Amazon’s frenetic growth, the company didn’t post a single quarterly profit for its first seven years. Bezos firmly believed that keeping customers happy was ultimately more important to Amazon’s future than satisfying Wall Street, once quipping that Amazon’s reputation was “worth a lot more to us right now than money.” It paid off. Amazon earned US$1.15 billion last year. Bezos may never achieve Jobs’s cultural icon status, but his story will be studied in business schools for years to come.
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Move over, Wal-Mart
By Erica Alini - Friday, August 26, 2011 at 1:21 PM - 2 Comments
Rivals are learning the hard way why Amazon is the next retail king
Emmanuel Dunand/AFP/Getty Images
“Amazon,” one Morgan Stanley analyst proclaimed recently, “is the Wal-Mart of our era.” The Seattle-based e-commerce giant is expected to report revenues of US$49 billion this year, an eye-popping 43 per cent year-over-year increase that beats Wal-Mart’s memorable 1991 performance, when it registered $44 billion in revenues and a 35 per cent increase over the previous year.
The world’s largest online retailer has also managed gargantuan growth without the bad publicity that earned its bricks-and-mortar cousin the epithet of “evil empire.” But try to get between Amazon and its bottom line, and you’ll see the company’s Darth Vader side. Governments and competitors who’ve tried to out-muscle it recently are finding a surprisingly feisty, shrewd business with a special knack for getting what it wants.
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You buy a book but don’t own it?
By Brian Bethune - Thursday, August 13, 2009 at 2:00 PM - 1 Comment
Amazon’s Kindle deletions sparked a host of questions over e-book rights and privacy
On July 17, when the online book retailer Amazon removed some e-books from its Kindle electronic reading device, the first media reports concentrated on the irony—cheap but delicious—that two of those disappeared titles were by George Orwell: Animal Farm and 1984. “Big Brother in the digital age” and “Orwell down the memory hole” were typical headlines placed over brief, written-to-amuse items about Amazon’s embarrassment when it realized that it didn’t have the legal right to sell those Kindle offerings. But it didn’t take long for more profound implications to sink in, or for the angry backlash to explode.Amazon hadn’t merely stopped selling those e-books, it had reached right into owners’ Kindles—via the same Whispernet wireless network it had used to load the readers with 1984—and removed copies the firm had already sold. While Amazon did refund the purchase price, its actions were, as more than one furious customer complained, equivalent to bookstore employees creeping into customers’ homes at night, culling their bookshelves and leaving a cheque behind. And the less tech-savvy the Kindle owner, the more astonished and angry the response. As Charles Slater, a Philadelphia executive, expostulated to the New York Times, “I never imagined that Amazon actually had the right, the authority or even the ability to delete something that I had already purchased.” Continue…
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You can't buy that here
By Colin Campbell - Tuesday, June 9, 2009 at 3:15 PM - 31 Comments
Why Canadians have to wait for the coolest new gadgets
In a university hall in New York City last month, in front of a standing-room-only crowd, Jeff Bezos, the founder and head of Amazon.com, unveiled a piece of electronic gadgetry that could revolutionize the way the world reads books, gets news, and receives information of all kinds. It was an ugly-looking slab of computer screen, but that didn’t dampen the crowd’s enthusiasm. The wireless gizmo, called the Kindle DX, may not be pretty—it lacks the elegant simplicity of the Apple iPod—but it does one thing virtually no other device has been able to do. With its big, crisp 9.7-inch display, it makes reading online as easy and enjoyable as doing it the old-fashioned way. And it can quickly download a library’s worth of content.There have been no shortage of e-book skeptics, but earlier versions of the Kindle have flown off of shelves. Amazon.com sold an estimated 500,000 Kindles last year—and was sold out of the device over Christmas. One analyst estimates it will earn the company over $1.5 billion in revenue by 2012. In the U.S., book sales may be on the decline, but e-book sales are surging. In Japan recently, four of the top 10 bestsellers were released exclusively as e-books. And Bezos was joined onstage by the chairman of the New York Times, Arthur Sulzberger, Jr.—“Wonderful!” he shouted at the device’s unveiling. Along with the Times, the Boston Globe and the Washington Post will soon be testing their products on the Kindle in the belief it could save their industry. What Bezos unveiled was a whole lot more than a gadget. A lot of people are thinking the Kindle will be to the printed word what iTunes has been to music.
