How did Amazon grow so fast? By thinking outside the shipping box
In the autumn of 2014, talk show host Charlie Rose interviewed Steve Ballmer, former head of the Seattle-based software giant Microsoft. When Rose asked his view of another prominent Seattle company, Ballmer minced no words. “In my world,” he said, “you’re not a real business until you make some money.”
The target of Ballmer’s jibe, Amazon.com, was indeed an enigma. Although it had long since become a household name, Amazon was notorious for its chronic inability to turn revenue into profit. As Ballmer spoke, it was in the midst of a money-losing year and its stock price was sagging. But over the next six years, the company’s stock market value would mushroom from $141 billion to $1.6 trillion, turning Amazon into the fourth-largest corporation on the planet.
Before billionaires started routinely announcing their divorces on Twitter, Jeff Bezos had to beat the tabloids. This is how he did it.
— Brad Stone (@BradStone) May 5, 2021
The first excerpt from my new book #AmazonUnbound, out May 11, is on the cover of this week's @BW: https://t.co/8VkdYCxx9r
How this occurred is the subject of Brad Stone’s fascinating and deeply researched new book, “Amazon Unbound: Jeff Bezos and the Invention of a Global Empire.” Stone, a journalist with Bloomberg News, is no stranger to Amazon; his 2013 book, “The Everything Store,” controversially explored how Bezos, who founded the company in 1994, built his start-up bookstore into the dominant force in U.S. online retailing. By contrast, retailing plays an almost incidental role in “Amazon Unbound.” Center stage belongs to a far less visible enterprise, cloud computing, which generates the revenue to fuel Amazon’s supercharged expansion.
With cloud computing, an organization can rent computers, programmers and security experts from an external provider such as Amazon instead of maintaining its own data centers. Amazon pioneered cloud computing in the early 2000s, and by the 2010s it was easily the market leader.
