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Jeff Bezos and Amazon.com

Amazon.com is known as one of the largest shopping sites on the internet. It could be described as the Wal-Mart of the online community. With so many different categories, items, and products to buy from it could be considered one stop shopping for online goods. But where did this site come from? Why is it so successful today and has it always been successful? Who is the genius behind the concept and implementation of such a massive community? The answer to these questions is a man born Jeff Bezos. Bezos was a visionary in a population that did not recognize its full potential. With his ideas and foresight he brought Amazon.com into the front of the online community and transformed a small online book dealership into the multi-billion conglomerate industry it is today.
Early History of Jeff Bezos

Jeff Bezos was born on January 12, 1964 in Albuquerque, New Mexico. He grew up spending most of his summers at his grandfather’s ranch in Texas, working on various tasks and showing a surprising amount of mechanical aptitude. When he was a young boy he was able to dismantle his crib with a screwdriver. This helps to illustrate the kind of man that Bezos would grow up to be. This task took initiative, curiosity, ingenuity, and a certain amount of roguishness to accomplish. He would apply many of these same attributes later in life to his business.
Jeffrey’s biological father left he and his mother when Jeff was only one year old. She remarried to his stepfather, Mike Bezos, when Jeff was four. Mike had escaped from Cuba when he was fifteen and managed to get an education from the University of Albuquerque. This helped to provide Jeffrey with an exemplary role model to look up to. Mike was an engineer and moved the family to Houston to work for Exxon.
With his mechanical aptitude and a father in the engineering business he began to show much interest in science. He did many of his experiments out of his parents’ garage. After the stint in Houston, the Bezos family moved to Miami, Florida. This is where Jeff attended high school and did very well there. He was the valedictorian of his year and fell in love with computers (Jeff Bezos Biography, 2005).
College and Early Business Career

With this love of computers he attended Princeton University. His original plan had been to study physics, but soon turned back to this old love. With computer science and electrical engineering degrees Jeff was ready to move into the real world and was driven to make money.
After Princeton Bezos found employment on Wall Street with the stock market. With his computer science background he was able to help study market trends electronically. He began his career at a company called Fitel, which was a start-up company. He worked for other financial businesses as well, including Bankers Trust, and D. E. Shaw. At Bankers Trust he was able to move up into a Vice Presidency, and at D. E. Shaw he found his future wife. Her name is Mackenzie and was a Princeton Graduate as well. He was eventually able to move up into a Senior Vice Presidency position at D. E. Shaw. This was when he made a brilliant career move, but also had to take a big leap of faith (Jeff Bezos Biography, 2005).
A Brief History of the Internet

The internet was first developed in the 1960s. J.C.R Licklider of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology first proposed a global network of computers in 1962, and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA, headed the development of this project. Lawrence Roberts of MIT successfully connected a Massachusetts computer with a California computer in 1965 over normal dial up telephone lines. Roberts moved to the DARPA project in 1966 and developed the plan for the ARPANET.
In 1969 the ARPANET was brought online by ARPA, which was DARPA renamed. It connected four major universities; UCLA, Stanford Research Institute, UCSB, and the University of Utah. In 1970 MIT, Harvard, BBN, and Systems Development Corp. were also added to the network. Even more were included in 1971 and the system kept growing after that.
In the 1970s the internet matured with the advent of the TCP/IP architecture. It replaced the NCP, or Network Control Protocol and was universally adopted by 1983. TCP/IP was one of the true stepping stones in the creation of the modern internet, and the TCP/IP system is still used today.
Tim Burners-Lee and others at CERN proposed a new protocol for information systems in 1991. This was a hypertext based system. This means it used a system of links embedded in pages and text to link to other text and pages. This is the system still in use today by modern graphical web browsers such as Mozilla’s Firefox, Microsoft’s Explorer, and Safari or Opera.
The next huge development in the internet as we know it today was the design and implementation of a graphical web browser called Mosaic. This was created by Marc Andreessen and a team at the NCSA, or National Center for Supercomputing Applications. This was the first one of its kind, and Andreessen then moved on and created the next generation called Netscape (Howe, 2007).
The Start of Amazon.com

This is where the internet and Jeff Bezos collide. In the spring of 1994 Jeff noticed that internet usage was rising by 2300 percent a year. This is an astronomical number. Without any internet commercial traffic to speak of Bezos, like many other visionaries, saw a grand opportunity in front of him. With the scientific mind that he has, Bezos researched leading mail-order companies to see which could be a viable fit for the new internet medium. His conclusion came to books, because no comprehensive mail-order service existed for them. With the internet a vast database could be used to hold all the information of all the books. No catalog is large enough to do this (Jeff Bezos Biography, 2005).
After attending the American Booksellers’ Convention in Los Angeles, Bezos found out that most major book sellers had already put together large electronic lists of their stockpiles of books. If he could get a single location on the internet for all of these books where interested parties could search these sellers and order directly from the company he would be in business. He also knew he would have go into business by himself, which was a substantial risk. He sacrificed his safe job and made the decision to start this company (Jeff Bezos Biography, 2005).
He relocated to Seattle to get in touch with Ingram which was a book whole seller. His wife Mackenzie drove, and on the way Jeff typed up a business plan on the way. He decided to name it Amazon after the mighty river in South America. It seems to have no end and an infinite amount of branches (Ramo, 1999).
On July 16, 1995, Bezos opened Amazon to the world. He had 300 beta testers and his code worked across all platforms. He had three Sun Microstations set up on tables made from doors he purchased at Home Depot for less than 60 dollars each. These 300 beta testers spread the news about the website to everyone they could. By then end of 30 days Amazon had sold books to all 50 states and across 45 countries in the world. By that September they were making 20,000 dollars a week in sales. (Jeff Bezos Biography, 2005)
Continued Expansion

Amazon went public in 1997. They had seen steady growth, but skeptics still wondered if an online bookstore could continue to succeed. Other larger companies were still in charge of the market and this could potentially be a problem.

Two years after the skepticism Amazon proved them all wrong by being larger than its two greatest competitors combined (Frey & Cook, 2004).
Bezos then unveiled his newest strategy. To take Amazon from the internet’s biggest book store to the internet’s biggest everything store. Again skeptics though that too much growth could kill the company. Again they were wrong, and the wise people that had invested money in Amazon.com were now if not billionaires, at least millionaires (Jeff Bezos Biography, 2005).
Surviving the dot com burst

When the century turned and the year 2000 was upon us, Amazon.com start to hit its darkest hours. With the focus on getting big quickly, and restructuring internal organization by laying off over 150 employees, Amazon.com saw huge losses. By summer of 2000 stock had dropped by one third and it reported a loss of 500 million dollars plus for the holiday fourth quarter. In 2001 Amazon reported an annual loss of 1.4 billion dollars. Many speculated this was the end of the road for them (Frey & Cook, 2004).
Bezos had had enough of it. He restructured the entire organization. He layed off 1,300 workers, tore down two warehouses, and got rid of a call center. He told his people to stop selling items that weren’t profitable, and made a great focus on customer service. It started to bolster it’s offerings by selling products in other peoples warehouses as opposed to his own. He could directly sell Target products or Toy “R” Us products. He had pulled his company out of the slump by what seemed to be sheer will, but was in actuality great management and implementation of a successful strategy (Frey & Cook, 2004).
Awards and Lasting Contributions

In 1999 Jeff Bezos won Time Magazines Person of the Year award. At the tender age of 35, he was the fourth youngest to ever win the award. Only Charles Lindbergh, Queen Elizabeth II, and Martin Luther King Jr. were younger. Dubbed the King of cybercommerce by the magazine it was easy to see why. With his revolutionary vision and excellent managerial techniques he pioneered the idea of internet commerce. He was able to survive the dot com burst with an idea of refocusing and customer service. He has been able to keep this company successful for over 13 years (Ramo, 1999).
There are people who have not bought a compact disc at a store in years. There are other people who have not bought clothes at a retail mall in this same amount of time. The reason is because all they have to do is point and click on a website. The clothes or compact discs or anything else will be delivered directly to their doorstep. This is the idea that Jeff Bezos had and has made successful, not only for himself but for other internet whole sellers as well. These are the advancements that helped to make the internet a success.