History of Amazon
Amazon is an American multinational technology company which focuses on e-commerce, cloud computing, and digital streaming.
Initially an online marketplace for books, it has expanded into a multitude of product categories: a strategy that has earned it the moniker "the everything store".
[5] In 1994, Bezos left his job as a vice president at D. E. Shaw & Co., a Wall Street firm, and moved to Seattle, Washington, where he began to work on a business plan[6] for what would become Amazon.com.
[8] Bezos selected this name by looking through a dictionary; he settled on "Amazon" because it was a place that was "exotic and different", just as he had envisioned for his Internet enterprise.
[9] Bezos placed a premium on his head start in building a brand and told a reporter, "There's nothing about our model that can't be copied over time.
[11] After reading a report about the future of the Internet that projected annual web commerce growth at 2,300%, Bezos created a list of 20 products that could be marketed online.
[17] The first book sold on Amazon.com was Douglas Hofstadter's Fluid Concepts and Creative Analogies: Computer Models of the Fundamental Mechanisms of Thought.
Although this suit was also settled out of court, it caused Amazon to implement internal restrictions and the reassignment of the former Walmart executives.
[23] Also in 1999, Time magazine named Bezos the Person of the Year when it recognized the company's success in popularizing online shopping.
This comparatively slow growth caused stockholders to complain that the company was not reaching profitability fast enough to justify their investment or even survive in the long term.
In 2001, the dot-com bubble burst, destroying many e-companies in the process, but Amazon survived and moved forward beyond the tech crash to become a huge player in online sales.
The Fire Phone was meant to deliver media streaming options but the venture failed, resulting in Amazon registering a $170 million loss.
In August of the same year, Amazon would finalize the acquisition of Twitch, a social video gaming streaming site, for $970 million.
[29][30] The acquisition was seen by media experts as a move to strengthen its physical holdings and challenge Walmart's supremacy as a brick and mortar retailer.
This sentiment was heightened by the fact that the announcement coincided with Walmart's purchase of men's apparel company Bonobos.
[40] Amazon launched the last-mile delivery program and ordered 20,000 Mercedes-Benz Sprinter Vans for the service in September 2018.
[46][47] With more than one million workers employed in warehouses around the world, Amazon in 2023 started testing humanoid robots that provide partial automation of its work tasks.
[53] On February 14, 2019, Amazon announced it was not moving forward with plans to build HQ2 in Queens[54] but would instead focus solely on the Arlington location.
The announcement also created a new partnership with Virginia Tech University to develop an Innovation Campus to fill the demand for high-tech talent in National Landing and beyond.
At the end of March 2020, some workers of the Staten Island warehouse staged a walkout in protest of the poor health situation at their workplace amidst the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic.
The company hired approximately 175,000 additional warehouse workers and delivery contractors to deal with the surge, and temporarily raised wages by $2/hour.
