There’s Innovation Ahead
The dot-com boom-and-bust is often compared to the 1849 Gold Rush, and Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos offers historical evidence showing how similar they were: from the riches made by pioneers to the media hype that attracted luckless speculators. But a better analogy can be found in the early days of the electric industry, he says. In the late 1800s, the U.S. was first wired to support lightbulbs; the following century saw a long procession of new appliances, life-changing advances, and of course some amusing failures. His conclusion in 2003: “I believe there’s more innovation ahead of us than behind us.”
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About Jeff Bezos:
Jeff Bezos didn’t invent online shopping, but he almost single-handedly turned it into a multi-billion-dollar enterprise. His Amazon.com began as a bookstore in 1994, and quickly expanded into dozens of product categories, forcing the world’s biggest retailers to rethink their business models, and ultimately changing the way people shop.
But Amazon.com isn’t just an internet success story. It’s the standard by which all web businesses are now judged — if not by their shareholders, then by their customers. Amazon set a high bar for reliability and customer service, and also introduced a wide range of online retail conventions — from user reviews and one-click shopping to the tab interface and shopping cart icon — so commonplace we no longer think of them as once having been innovations.
When the Internet bubble burst, Amazon.com took a hit with the other e-commerce pioneers, but the fundamentally sound company hung tough. It now sells more than $8 billion a year of goods, profitably, and its technology will influence the changes to business and media that will come next. Bezos, meanwhile, is one of the few early Web CEOs who still run the companies they founded. Outside of his work with Amazon, he recently founded Blue Origin, a space-flight startup.
Tags: Amazon, Business, Business, Design, Dollar Enterprise, Early Web, Gold Rush, Innovation, Innovation, Internet, Internet Bubble, Jeff Bezos, Late 1800s, Media Hype, Procession, Space Flight, Speculators, Technology, Web BusinessesRelated posts
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