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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!
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
...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.
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 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.
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.
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.)
Here's some flashback to late 97 for ya'll. http://web.archive.org/web/19971221012817/http://s lashdot.org/
Rikki