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Book Review: The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon
Brad Stone spent years researching Amazon as a journalist, speaking to Bezos a handful of times in the process. His footwork clearly shows in the book, which is exhaustively detailed without ever feeling bogged down. The most surprising thing, perhaps, is that Bezos didn’t start Amazon.com out of an all-consuming love for books, although he reads voraciously; in the early 1990s, realizing that the Internet was the Next Big Thing, he drew up a list of potential products that best fit the nascent e-commerce model in his head, including computer software and music.
“The category that eventually jumped out at him as the best option was books,” Stone writes. “They were pure commodities; a copy of a book in one store was identical to the same book carried in another, so buyers always knew what they were getting.” At the time, only two major distributors actually handled shipping books, which would make it easier for Bezos to set up a supply chain; and in reasonably short order, his growing team figured out how to get each volume to the customer relatively intact.
Much of the book details Amazon’s rapid growth in the years preceding the dot-com bubble. In his quest to create an “everything store” capable of shipping a wide variety of products to nearly anywhere in the world with a mailing address, Bezos pushed his employees relentlessly; many couldn’t take the pace. Even as customers ordered books, movies, and other goods from a handsome and smoothly running Website, the underlying infrastructure strained to handle all that traffic; meanwhile, the warehouse and distribution operations (headed up by executives poached from WalMart) evolved into a lab of sorts, as the company did its best to figure out how to ship products in the quickest and most efficient ways. (Praise today’s startups all you want, but most of them never have to handle real-world logistics on a massive scale.)
The book paints a nuanced portrait of the hard-driving Bezos, who comes off as a spectacularly unsentimental individual more than willing to fight to the bitter end with pretty much anyone to get what he wants. Stone offers up a bit about Bezos’ childhood—even as a youngster he was ambitious, and technically inclined—and tracks down his biological father, who was unaware that his son had grown up to become a billionaire businessman. (When they finally communicate, it’s by email; Bezos writes a quick message that he bears the old man no ill will for leaving him as a baby, and wishes him “the very best.”) But the overall focus here is on Bezos the Businessman, plunging into the details of everything from the Kindle to free shipping, and determined above all else to conquer the world’s marketplaces.
This is one of those biographies that will probably end up on the shelf of every self-styled “entrepreneur” and Internet CEO looking for a role model. For those who’re merely interested in Amazon, e-commerce, or stories about people who bulldoze their way to success, The Everything Store is a highly entertaining read.
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I was always a low level engineer so I can't claim that I personally interacted with either Gates or Bezos (although one time I nearly slammed a door into Bill's head but I don't see the point of dwelling on missed opportunities).
From my PoV they are both driven individuals who also drove their employees hard. However I think Bezos is the better businessman. Both of them generate a significant amount of fear with their underlings. You never wanted BillG going off in your product review and I saw people turn white when they got the infamous one character email from Bezos (the character in question being '?'). But at MS the fear was all theatrics. There is a huge amount of outright morons that to this day constitute a large chunk of MS middle management and not only are they allowed to screw up project after project, they often get rewarded for it (I have seen one rise from first line manager to corporate VP; hasn't shipped anything in 15 years).
At Amazon consequences were real, and went far beyond mere humiliation at the hands of the boss. I have seen director level people being asked to empty their desks within the hour. As a cog this filled me with joy.