Relentless TMA 01
Amazon
Relentless.com
At 20 Amazon is bulking up. It is not—yet—slowing down
Jun 21st 2014 | PHOENIX AND SEATTLE | From the print edition
HIGH-TECH creation myths are expected to start with a garage. Amazon, impatient with ordinary from the outset, began with a road trip. In the summer of 1994 Jeff Bezos quit his job on Wall Street, flew to Fort Worth, Texas, with his wife MacKenzie and hired a car.
While MacKenzie drove them towards the Pacific Northwest, Jeff sketched out a plan to set up a catalogue retailing business that would exploit the infant internet. The garage came later, in a suburb of Seattle, where he set up an office furnished with desks made from wooden doors. About a year later, Amazon sold its first book.
The world saw a website selling books and assumed that Amazon was, and always would be, an online bookshop. Mr Bezos, though, had bigger plans. Books were a good way into online retailing: once people learned to buy books online they would buy more and more other stuff, too. The website would be able to capture much more data about what they looked at and thus might want than any normal shop; if they reviewed things, that would enrich the experience for other shoppers. He saw a virtuous circle whereby low prices pulled in customers and merchants, which boosted volumes, which led to ever lower prices—a
“flywheel” that would generate growth for as long as the company put the interests of the customers first. Early on, Mr Bezos registered “relentless.com” as a possible name; if it was a little lacking in touchy-feeliness, it captured the ambition nicely.
A phone to shop with
The latest manifestation of that ambition was unveiled in Seattle on June 18th: Amazon’s first phone. The Fire Phone is designed to stand out in a market crowded with sleek devices in various ways, such as with a sort-of-3D screen, but none is more telling than its Firefly button. This uses cloud computing to provide the user with information about more or less anything the
Relentless.com
At 20 Amazon is bulking up. It is not—yet—slowing down
Jun 21st 2014 | PHOENIX AND SEATTLE | From the print edition
HIGH-TECH creation myths are expected to start with a garage. Amazon, impatient with ordinary from the outset, began with a road trip. In the summer of 1994 Jeff Bezos quit his job on Wall Street, flew to Fort Worth, Texas, with his wife MacKenzie and hired a car.
While MacKenzie drove them towards the Pacific Northwest, Jeff sketched out a plan to set up a catalogue retailing business that would exploit the infant internet. The garage came later, in a suburb of Seattle, where he set up an office furnished with desks made from wooden doors. About a year later, Amazon sold its first book.
The world saw a website selling books and assumed that Amazon was, and always would be, an online bookshop. Mr Bezos, though, had bigger plans. Books were a good way into online retailing: once people learned to buy books online they would buy more and more other stuff, too. The website would be able to capture much more data about what they looked at and thus might want than any normal shop; if they reviewed things, that would enrich the experience for other shoppers. He saw a virtuous circle whereby low prices pulled in customers and merchants, which boosted volumes, which led to ever lower prices—a
“flywheel” that would generate growth for as long as the company put the interests of the customers first. Early on, Mr Bezos registered “relentless.com” as a possible name; if it was a little lacking in touchy-feeliness, it captured the ambition nicely.
A phone to shop with
The latest manifestation of that ambition was unveiled in Seattle on June 18th: Amazon’s first phone. The Fire Phone is designed to stand out in a market crowded with sleek devices in various ways, such as with a sort-of-3D screen, but none is more telling than its Firefly button. This uses cloud computing to provide the user with information about more or less anything the