Amaya Toman In another of our historical series, we will focus on the creation of the most famous companies in the world - in the first part, we will focus on Amazon. Today, Amazon is one of the largest Internet companies in the world. But its beginnings date back to 1994. In today's article, we will briefly and clearly recall the beginnings and history of Amazon.
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The beginnings
Amazon - or Amazon.com - became a public company only in July 2005 (however, the Amazon.com domain was already registered in November 1994). Jeff Bezos started entrepreneurship in 1994, when he left his job on Wall Street and moved to Seattle, where he started working on his business plan. It included a company called Cadabra, but with this name - allegedly because of the sound form with the word corpse (corpse) – did not remain, and Bezos renamed the company Amazon after a few months. Amazon's first location was a garage in the house where Bezos lived. Bezos and his then-wife MacKenzie Tuttle registered a number of domain names, such as awake.com, browse.com or even bookmall.com. Among the registered domains was relentless.com. Bezos wanted to name his future online store this way, but friends talked him out of the name. But Bezos still owns the domain today, and if you enter the term in the address bar relentless.com, you will be automatically redirected to the Amazon website.
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Why Amazon?
Jeff Bezos decided on the name Amazon after flipping through the dictionary. The South American river seemed to him as "exotic and different" as his vision of an internet business at the time. The initial letter "A" also played its role in the choice of name, which guaranteed Bezos a leading position in various alphabetical lists. "Brand name is much more important online than in the physical world," said Bezos in an interview for Inc. magazine.
First the books…
Although Amazon was not the only online bookstore in its time, compared to its competition at the time in the form of Computer Literacy, it offered one undeniable bonus - convenience. Amazon customers literally had their ordered books delivered to their doorstep. Amazon's range is much wider these days and is far from limited to books - but that was part of Bezos' plan from the very beginning. In 1998, Jeff Bezos expanded Amazon's product range to include computer games and music carriers, and at the same time began to distribute goods internationally thanks to the purchase of online bookstores in Great Britain and Germany.
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…then absolutely everything
With the advent of the new millennium, consumer electronics, video games, software, home improvement items, and even toys began to be sold on Amazon. To get a little closer to his vision of Amazon as a technology company, Jeff Bezos also launched Amazon Web Services (AWS) a little later. Amazon's web services portfolio gradually expanded and the company continued to grow. But Bezos did not forget the "book origin" of his company either. In 2007, Amazon introduced its first electronic reader, the Kindle, and a few years later, the Amazon Publishing service was launched. It didn't take long, and Amazon officially announced that sales of classic books were surpassed by sales of e-books. Smart speakers have also emerged from Amazon's workshop, and the company is testing the distribution of its goods via drones. Like all large companies, Amazon has not escaped criticism, which concerns, for example, unsatisfactory working conditions in warehouses or the alleged interception of the recordings of users' calls with the virtual assistant Alexa by Amazon employees.
Sources: Interesting Engineering, Inc.
