How Amazon Has Got so Big

Amazon, a globally huge company and the second biggest employer in the US alone. But how on earth did it get so big? Well, we have to go back all the way to 1994 to understand that.

The guy that started all of it was Jeff Bezos and had recently heard that the opportunity of starting an online commerce website was about to skyrocket so he went and purchased the internet domain of www. relentless. com (bezos briefly thought about naming the site relentless but decided against it because it sounded so sinister His business plan started with twenty things that he thought people wanted to buy online then he cut it down to five, those five things were compact discs, computer software, computer hardware, videos and books he eventually decided to start by selling books. Amazon was then founded on the 5 July 1994 in his rented home’s garage in Washington. This was deliberate as he wanted to launch from humble beginnings as other tech companies had done. The first book ever bought on Amazon was Fluid Concepts and Creative Analogies: Computer Models of the Fundamental Mechanisms of Thought. And it was bought on the 3rd April 1995 by Australian software engineer John Wainwright. He had decided to buy something on Amazon because he had some friends that were helping develop Amazon and said he should buy something, so he did just that.

Jeff Bezos predicted that the company would not make a profit for 5 years but after that first book sold orders slowly started to trickle in. They then announced their first profitable year in 2001 six years after the first book was bought. In 1998 they started expanding and started to sell more than just books they started selling magazines, video games, computer hardware etc when they made their profit They Made profit, and from then on didn’t stop.

They are currently the third largest retailer in the world behind (in order) Walmart and Alibaba (American and Chinese respectively) and you guessed it the world’s largest online bookstore ever, so one may ask where does Amazon go from there? Well they started by producing a device called the Amazon echo, it is a device that listens to you and then does whatever is relevant to that information, the ai that powers it is called alexa, here is an example of what it does “alexa play my audiobook” Alexa: Playing A brief history of time by Stephen Hawkins. That is just one example of what echo/alexa can do.