Slashdot Mirror
Amazon.com Nears 10-Year Anniversary
mopslik writes "Amazon.com is nearing its 10-year anniversary. "Soon after Amazon.com Inc. debuted 10 years ago, Jeff Bezos and his handful of employees spent late summer nights packing books in a tiny warehouse, scrambling to ship a growing gush of orders. Today, the man who has grown accustomed to being hailed the king of Internet commerce runs a global powerhouse that did nearly $7 billion in sales last year, dealing in everything from banjo cases to wild boar baby back ribs." Although Bezos has drawn some ire from his collection of patents, there's no arguing that his company is one of the most successful online sites today."
I want to buy it a present!
Best Buy can have you arrested
And make the most of it - for legal reasons, this'll be the last 10-year anniversary party you'll be able to have without obtaining prior written consent from Mr Bozo!
If he does take that approch, he could be seen as a great hero to your average /. guy, with quite a bit of positive PR. Wonder if this segment of the market matters enough for him to do this.
..dealing in everything from banjo cases to wild boar baby back ribs.
Wake me up when I can buy banjo cases made out of wild boar baby back ribs.
Starsucks
...my birthday will be a slashdot story :D
At some point, however, you've covered all the bases. Amazon is already selling everything imaginable on that site, and they're exploring a lot of the horizontal and vertical market tie-ins. To me, this means that the industry is ripe to move towards commoditization: farming out all the stuff that Amazon does and connecting the creator of the material directly to the consumer. My two cents only.
Learn Management, Kid!
it's funny 'cause it's not the first post. heh.
The Cryptography Center
I hear that Bezos has applied for a patent on the 10-year anniversary.
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
Give Amazon every patent you ever owned....
or if you never actually owned a patent, send Jeff a list of obvious ideas that he should patent.
Seriusly, what does Amazon's patents have anything to do with their 10 year anniversary? Can't you have left that out of the story? What was the relevance here?
You may not like Amazon's patents, but it's pretty irrelevant to the subject at hand. To me, this was a cheapshot for the sake of pumping up RMS' and his hordes agenda.
I like how slashdot can't leave even this one story alone without trying to start a flamewar. The editors are the biggest trolls here.
When I was watching Amazon years ago, it seemed like it was destined to go out of business. With their seemingly pointless acquisitions of unrelated companies and the building of zShops, it was (at that time) a foregone conclusion that Amazon was buying itself into bankruptcy and that the company would be out of business before it ever showed a profit.
In that time, it has turned itself into a profit center and the foremost bookseller not only on the web but even among the traditional bricks and mortar book companies.
Who would have thought that such a reversal of fortune could be possible? Absolutely amazing to see what a company can do when led appropriately.
Jesus saved me from my past. He can save you as well.
Is this really news? Approaching a 10th anniversary, hmm? Are you going to run the same story when we actually reach their 10th anniversary? This is nothing more than a dupe in the making.
I suppose you could run a story about the aftermath of Amazon.com's 10th anniversary once it's all over, too. Fine journalism, that.
Actually, the one-click patent cited in the GNU link was really not so obvious after all. Even Tim O'Reilly, the man that offered $10,000 rewards for finding prior art to this, has later admitted this.
Man is a slave because freedom is difficult, whereas slavery is easy.
Amazon.com needs a wish list for its anniversary or it will get entirely too many flowers.
I'll be your candy shop of infinite deliciousity if you'll be my discotheque of endless rump-shaking.
If your competitors play it then your hand is forced and no large corporation can afford to NOT patent random crap.
For the most part these patents only exist to create some sort of nuclear stalemate - where your competitors are too afraid to sue you since it's certain that they violate some of your patents.
I'd sum it up in one word: usability. Sure, there are other reasons, but the Amazon User Experience (UX) is outstanding. Few other sites compare in terms of ease-of-use.
(I'd say the same thing about Google too.)
How to Download YouTube Videos
If cinderella had an unlimited advertising budget and blind faith investors to enable her to coast on zero profit for half a decade.
It's no secret why Amazon.com has succeded when many other online stores have fallen. They have fairly good prices, good service, and deals(like the current $25+ free shipping). It is just as easy as going to a real store, with no downsides.
They have a steady dependable business model of selling almost everything.
Amazon.com just works.
Note: I'm just a happy customer.
This
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Can we patent one click posting?
Seriously though, hats off to Amazon- like it or not, it wasn't easy to start a company 10 years ago on the net and have it still be in business....
I will say that I won't shop there because I am suspicious of any compnay that has a "buyer's club" that offers discounts, shipping or otherwise....
They do have some nice "Photography" books... Honest mom, it isn't porn, its erotica.... and stay out of the basement!"
And All I Ask is a Tall Ship And a Star to Steer Her By
Yeah, yeah, I know, you get those types on every Yahoo stock board, and some of them are just shorts trying to scare people away. But the meme on the Amazon board was that they were losing money on every sale...but making it up in volume! Hardy har har. These people were absolutely convinced that Amazon would never succeed at their profit margins. And indded, Amazon was losing money every quarter.
But Jeff Bezos kept saying that the important thing was growth and market share and mind share, and that to go to profitability too soon would be a mistake. The Yahooligans roundly laughed at Bezos for saying stuff like that. But in the end, Bezos pulled it off. Amazon survived the dot-bomb, and is a solid company. But I'll bet anything if I went to the Yahoo board today (I'm no longer an investor in them, so I don't check), they will still be saying that Amazon's end is nigh.
Shows you the value of ignorning conventional wisdom if you have a new idea and a strong vision of how to implemenent the idea in the long term.
$7 billion... Are they turning a profit? I suppose so. I'm sure I did my part, after my favorite tech bookstores (Computer Literacy) closed up shops to go on-line and became fathead or fatbrain whatever. Saving a couple bucks is OK, but I know I spent a ton on programming books when I had the chance to flip through them. Now I have only reviewers to trust and often they're not looking for the same things I am (good table of contents and a good comprehensive index are essential, along with clear code examples which are easy to follow from the discussion.)
Man... what went wrong?
BTW, how many of you have the gifts they used to send out to loyal customers? I've got a couple travel coffee cups, unopened (being a coffee drinker means always having too many things to drink it out of, as people give you them, they appear out of the ether, multiply in the backs of cupboards, etc. You'd think they were an alien species bent on world domination or were socks in their larval form.)
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Connecting the buyer and seller is all about trust.
Lots of people (myself included) would rather buy from amazon marketplace rather than eBay. Amazon probably take a bigger cut, but they provide decent customer service and bail you out when things go wrong.
Amazon have brand recognition and consumer confidence and it'll be a struggle for anyone else (particularly a non-profit organization) to garner that kind of support.
This week amazon inc. filed a patent for keeping a dotcom open for 10 years. "We were the first to do this so I think its rightly ours" said amazon president Jeff Bezos.
Chances are any disscution on Slashdot will degrade into a flamewar about ID/Christianity within 14 posts.
...now if they could only figure out that whole making a profit thing... :-)
------
(Yes, I know they actually made a profit a couple years ago. It's a joke. Laugh and move along.)
Coder's Stone: The programming language quick ref for iPad
Absolutely.
My wife really loathes having to use a computer. She will seldom use one if she doesn't have to. She'd rather do things by hand 99% of the time.
But she quite happily logs on and goes to Amazon to buy books. So they must be doing a lot of things right.
And they probably have a patent on anniversary gifts too.
One of my staff bought a book from them a year ago from a work account. Since then they've been sending me unsolicited offers for things I have no intention of buying.
Their e-mail contains no return or unsubscribe link. I believe that here in the UK that is illegal. I have struggled even to find a phone number or postal address on their website to send a cease-and-desist letter.
Yes, they're big and successful but their behaviour bears all the hallmarks of spammers.
They are driving smaller online retailers out of business, they encourage purchasing of cheap foreign imports and they have a negative cash flow into the economy in the form of low wages and outsourced jobs.
I boycott shopping at Amazon.com in the same manner that I do for brick and mortar shopping at Walmart. Give the small guys your business and help maintain a strong U.S. economy.
The Master (Angelo Rossitto) in Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome, "Not shit, energy!"
No, for that you need EBay.
will have to blow out the candles TWICE when it's their tenth anniversary
Damn! Now they'll patent anniversary discounts presented on websites.
Terrorists can't threaten a country's freedom and democracy. Only lawmakers and voters can do that.
a method to celebrate the existance of a company for 10 years through the cutting of cake and passing it around and making sure everyone has a piece. Seriously though, I have to give Amazon some credit, their interface and search are pretty decent, they do try to give value to their customers, and being able to read portions of books online really helps determine if a book is worth getting or not. Although I have to say purchasing anything other than books on Amazon tends to be a ripoff. Get better luck with froogle, unfortunately froogle isn't that useful if you're comparing canadian dollars. Although having amazon email me 3 times to purchase the latest harry potter book is rather annoying. If they released it as an ebook fine, but until then I won't be paying for it.
When I compair the Amazon site with B&N for books Amazon has a bit more choice and gives more insight in second and and third party prices. But in most cases the B&N page is more informative about the book itself.
As an affiliate I find it rather sloppy that Amazon doesn't have a better integration for its national sites. You have to apply for each site seperately and you get your money seperately. And where Google adwords is advanced with bank transfers Amazon still pays with old fashioned checks. Affiliates are asked to get their product data from an XML database that quite often gives different results on availablity as the Amazon search engine.
All in all my impression is that execution is rather sloppy. It will not be easy but there definitely is room for competitors to improve on what Amazon offers.
A quick glance shows that Amazon may actually achieve a level of zero net tangible assets (they've been in the red for years) this year. Similarly, another glance shows that 2004 was the first year Amazon actually made a real profit (2003 was about breakeven).
I am impressed, though, that Amazon actually hung in there through years and years of losses and now actually has a profitable, reasonably sustainable business.
Simple Unexpected Concrete Credible Emotional Stories
....Googlezon! Amazon appears to generally be off in a good direction, considering that it's still fairly young. It also has an interesting selection, including oddities such as a 1,082 volume classics collection that would be practically impossible to read in a lifetime. I just hope that they don't go too patent-crazy...they're supposed to be a book seller, not the monstrosity of a magnate! Maybe they will end up as some sort of mega-corporation in a technnology-dominated future. Frobozz Magic Book Company anyone?
This is exactly why the internet should be closed captioned for the hearing impaired.
Where does the school board find them and why do they keep sending them to ME?
Modern business theories teach that you must either dominate the market or die. Making a profit at what you do is not sufficient, you must either have complete control of the market or perish.
If Amazon hires people from modern American business schools, I think it is more likely that they will use their patents to play the S&M business game than it is likely that they will use their patents to prevent abuse of the market.
Amazon lets anyone sell books through their system. Why would anyone want to start their own online bookstore (for millions of dollars) when they can just setup an Amazon frontend?
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
Amazon.org jokes?
...although I enjoy reading the "user comments" on Amazon.
Many times, however, I find Amazon an easier process to purchase books except when a book is out of print or from a private seller, I can order it more easily from B&N when I order a couple of other books.
I think the B&N search for a title or author usually does a better job than Amazon - less junk. I'm not enamored with the "search inside" or "related" garbage. I usually pretty much know what I want.
Oh - and in NYC - I can get free overnight delivery from B&N.
Had barnes and noble been behaving like a tech company then they'd have patented crossing out a books list price and displaying their lower price.
Then Amazon would have been afraid to sue B&N for fear of a retaliatory suit.
1. Go to amazon.co.uk
2. Click on the "Your account" button
3. Follow the link called "Update your communication preferences"
4. Sign in
5. Change your preferences. They're all pretty straight forward. There's even one called "Don't send me any messages that aren't related to my orders, bids or services that I sign up for directly."
I'm waiting for the 10th anniversary of Googlezon or maybe the 10th anniversary of the Google Grid
. . . Amazon patents the 10-year anniversary.
Pretty Pictures!
It's amazing how many new topics posted on Slashdot are just rehashes of the news I saw hours ago on MyYahoo.
Amazon.com, Inc. 605 5th Ave S SEATTLE WA US 98104
207.171.163.13
Linux
Apache/1.3.26 Unix mod_perl/1.22 mod_ssl/2.8.10 OpenSSL/0.9.6
The sign was hilarious. At the time, Amazon was bleeding money, and Bezos kept telling his stockholders that the company was doing well.
The jury is still out on Amazon. It still has net negative worth due to the accumulated losses starting from date of its founding until 2003.
January 1st, 1970
:-)
Otherwise known as the "Epoch"
Amazon hasn't been able to process their own GCs for at least 6 weeks now, so all GC orders are stuck eternally in processing!
:)
You might consider getting them a Best Buy GC - maybe their Geek Squad can fix Amazon's problem
8-PP
I still have my amazon coffee travel mug they sent me one year. Wonder if I'll get another one? :)
bezos had mommy and daddy, it's easy to innovate when you only have pride to lose.
I figure this article will be a dupe later on, so why not have a dupe within a dupe... :)
Yeah yeah, mod me down...
I had a job interview over the phone with Jeff Bezos shortly after they launched (must have been Dec. 1995 or so). I got off the phone and my wife said, "He's a lot smarter than you, isn't he?" ;-)
I wanted to take the job, but couldn't afford the 20% pay cut to $33K...
"In reality, however, users no longer have to log into their personal user accounts --their account is always-on, tied to their Internet Protocol address. It has come to the point where users have to exert effort to sign-out. This is a fundamental paradigmatic shift in retail, and it has begun to manifest itself in the non-retail sector. For example, Google's Gmail allows users to go 2 weeks without confirming their personal user account password. In short, nowadays, users are never not logged into their personal user accounts."
*This is taken from a term paper I wrote in the spring semester. I'll post the full text of "Personal User Accounts are the Future of the Internet" to my website later this week.
Yes, but it can be a pain if you want to suprise your wife with porn , and it pops up on recently viewd items next time she checks amazon. From now on all porn will come from brick-and-mortar stores and be purchased with cash.
I know I'm just pissing in the wind about this, but "10-year anniversary" is as bad as "PIN number" and "ATM machine". The correct term is "10th anniversary".
I blame people who want to celebrate three-month relationships with an "anniversary", in defiance of the fact that three months isn't really that long, and probably doesn't merit a Hallmark card.
Rant over.
Well not quite - but my last order with them was a real pain - they said it was shipped, charged my card, but the Canada Post tracking never left the "electronically submitted" status - meaing I never got it. An email and another 2 week wait - and about 6 weeksafter I placed my order, I got it. The irony is, I can order a CD from Germany (a fellow there who deals in fairly obscure electronica) and always have it within about 3 days.
Still, mnost of my dealings with Amazon, other than this one, have been very good - I just wish they had a bit wider selection of the less common music I like.
Going on means going far
Going far means returning
Separate accounts at Amazon. That way you can each shop for each other, and not know what the other has gotten. You can even make use of a little feature they added maybe 5 or 6 years ago called wish lists. Just make sure that after you check out you don't hit that link that says share a discounted deal out to all your Amazon friends, if you've listed her as a friend.
For the most part these patents only exist to create some sort of nuclear stalemate - where your competitors are too afraid to sue you since it's certain that they violate some of your patents.
You're joking, right? Surely you aren't really that naive.... Amazon is doing anything but collecting a portfolio of defensive patents...they are actively stockpiling offensive weapons to use against any competitor, anywhere, for any reason they like.
That may be the case, but the parent post was right that this is common practise. This is exactly how patents are used e.g. by big pharmaceutical companies, who stockpile patents on various processes as a sort of Mutual Assured Destruction policy against each other.
I personally agree with you that MAD is nuts, and counter to the public interest. I also hate patents on "streaming media", etc. However, Amazon's behaviour shouldn't be seen out of context. The point is that many other technology companies are doing this too, and perhaps (as the FSF has decided) a more accurate barometer of their intentions is the way in which they use these patents.
(FSF, at least, seems to think the Barnes and Noble lawsuit ended without too much collateral damage; see link in article summary.)
walmart.
And the only reason they are not one company, is because they both already are accomplishing what they would do under one name.
In other words, walmart never seriously has attempted to infringe on amazon, nor take-it-over, simply because it would be tooo obvious a move (by the commies), and would ultimately have the same net effect as they do now.
I mean just look at walmarts standard drab blue-grey store fronts.. with a big RED STAR!!
And as USUAL, the only ones making any money at amazon, is the higher-ups, like Bozo. All the *real* workers there are paid very poorly and are treated very badly (monitored) and harassed.
But of course monitoring and harassing is only illegal, if your an individual attempting it...
The secret is out that communism & capitalism are one in the same.. yes, they both gather all the wealth and power under just a *few* (or should I say, kikes?).
But thats ok, cause there are 6.5 billion of us, and really only a relatively small amount of you!! :[
I will gladly loose all of life's battles.. in order to win the war..
Bathroom breaks are regulated even in the US at some companies, i.e. GEICO. My girlfriend used to work there and had says they used to monitor bathroom breaks and track time out for lunch and such to the second. Employees are forced to purchase a timer so that they do not take too long of a break for lunch or the bathroom. They regulated who you could and could not associate with during breaks. They would also fire you if you got sick and had to take too much time off, even with a doctor's note. Thus, I will never work at GEICO or purchase insurance through them.
Nice Marmot
Here's some flashback to late 97 for ya'll. http://web.archive.org/web/19971221012817/http://s lashdot.org/
Rikki
I've had a seller fail to ship the advertised book in each of these situations.
It took me close to 2 months to get my money back from half.com, and in the end I did some detective work and called the seller up... Turns out it was an innocent mistake on their part and they refunded my cash - they hadn't even heard from half.com about my problem.
Amazon had it sorted in about 2 hours.
The plural of anecdote isn't data - but i've made my choice.
I should'nt have this habit where I click "view source code" for every interesting site I visit.
,.. ugly? Bit like their site. It works, really well, but looks like a disorganised mess with an overload of "suggestions".
Amazon's code is just so
The code is the same, style sheets, javascript all in the main page. Must load quickly, and make best use of web server page compression but common, nearly identical Javascript code repeated 10 times?
On the other hand -- Barnes & Nobles seems to think that keyword spamming is the way forward (half a million "Barnes and Nobles in Meta tags and comment lines)
I know a couple of people who are entry-level software engineers at Amazon, and I just wish I made what they did. As far as monitoring, there's just the standard level of logging at the proxy level and such - no worse than your ISP or any other employer. It's really not a bad place to hang your hat.
* Service "I want that book with the upside-down dog on the cover." Can you search for that on Amazon? I know people who have worked in the book biz for a while, and the things they can pull out of a badly-remembered-bookname can make your head spin. "I think it had a green cover and was published in the 80s." Can't do that on Amazon.
* Selection. Are you serious here? There's a small bookstore down the street (Valencia Street Books) that I'm associated with. The owner has hand-picked all the books herself. No stupid diet books or books on "how to snag a guy in 10 days". Just books that don't suck. Do you really want to have to wade through all the stupid books out there just to find things like Punk Rock Aerobics"?
Sure she doesn't have much of a tech section, but only specialty bookstores do. Ditto for math/science type stuff. But this being San Francisco, all of those exist. * Convenience? I can walk two blocks, cruise the "new releases" section and "books we like" section, plonk down some cash and walk out. No wait time for shipping, etc.
* Romantic idea? Sure! Where else to cruise for hot babes? Perfect for geeks!
* Price? Well, yes and no. For the latest thriller, sure. For something from an independant publisher though, you'll pay more than if you'd special ordered it through a local bookstore. Plus there's always shipping.
Note: In corporate bookstores, publishers pay to have their books carried and displayed. In independant bookstores, they can't do that. Now do you want corporations to choose what you read? Take Wal-mart and their refusal to carry "indecent" books like America (because of photoshopped/gimpped naked Supreme Court Judges). Independants will always have wacky things like the SF-local Diary of a Mosquito Abatement Man and not give a fuck about offending someone, while still carrying their favorite classic kid's books (Ferdinand, This is San Francisco).
And does it really need saying that the workers are cuter? (Chalk it up to those lax dress codes!) Or maybe you prefer the old ladys of Wal-mart? I suppose if you're asocial than Amazon is for you, but honestly, you might as well practice those social skills and ask the lovely lady at the counter out. She'll turn you down nicely.
Maybe they'll invest in mom-n-pop brick & mortar bookstores. Oh, wait, those don't show a profit either!
I'm curious. Did you get scared off? Need the money? Cash out at an earlier date when you thought it hit a high?
It's just that you sound like you were a fairly sensible invester who didn't believe in the hype that Amazon was going down, so it sounds distinctly odd that you dropped their stock.
This sig has absolutely no significance and serves only to take up screen space and waste the time of the reader.