In the course of less than three decades, Amazon has blossomed from a simple online bookseller to one of the most successful and powerful companies in the twenty-first century. The Founder and CEO Jeff Bezos has grown resoundingly that critics, overseas regulators, and Washington politicians are all now in a dilemma and in a state of frustration whether the company has become a huge force to recon, and what, if anything is capable of reining in its reach. A previous spat with Sen. Bernie Sanders (D-VT) gave a for tens of thousands of employees' minimum wages, but Amazon still runs largely without any meaningful checks on its so-called huge power even as it moves aggressively to conquer other areas of business such as physical retail, the smart home, and warehouse and aviation robotics. Yet although having an influence in a vast number of different industries, consumers in essence still trust Amazon with all things from their personal information and buying habits to the conv...
In the course of less
than three decades, Amazon has blossomed from a simple online bookseller to one
of the most successful and powerful companies in the twenty-first century. The
Founder and CEO Jeff Bezos has grown resoundingly that critics, overseas regulators,
and Washington politicians are all now in a dilemma and in a state of
frustration whether the company has become a huge force to recon, and what, if
anything is capable of reining in its reach. A previous spat with Sen. Bernie
Sanders (D-VT) gave a for tens of thousands of employees' minimum wages, but
Amazon still runs largely without any meaningful checks on its so-called huge
power even as it moves aggressively to conquer other areas of business such as
physical retail, the smart home, and warehouse and aviation robotics.
Yet although having an
influence in a vast number of different industries, consumers in essence still
trust Amazon with all things from their personal information and buying habits
to the conversations they have in their own homes (which are listened by Echo).
According to a study, The Verge conducted in conjunction with consulting firm
Reticle Research in 2017, Amazon tops as being the most-liked and trusted
technology brand by a big margin. One possible reason is that the company has a strong bond with its customers, resulting partly to its zealous commitment to
low prices and an unwavering drive to make modern life more convenient and
"easy".
Given that
relation, Amazon has vastly escalated up its development into more industries
and markets over the years, with that expansion, quickly moving since the inception of the first Amazon Echo speaker with Alexa in just five years ago.
To fully grasp just how big the company has grown over the last 25 years, The
Verge has put together a guide on every major sector, product category, and
market Amazon has entered into either by developing its own products or
services or by acquiring an existing provider with an established position.
Of course, it
wouldn’t be a clear look back at Amazon without starting first with books — of
the paper variety.
Print books
Amazon was
founded back in 1994 around Bezos’ desire to dive into an internet-based
business, with the goal of selling items online emerging as an early and
obvious inroad into the dot-com boom. A former Wall Street worker with
electrical engineering and computer science degrees, Bezos started by selling
only books as a viable initial product category for his online store due to the
universality of literature, the existing stock of print books, and the relatively low price of each entity. Bezos firstly considered naming his company
Relentless.com — an early sign of the man’s tenacious business mindset — but
friends and family suggested it was too generic sounding. Relentless.com, which
Bezos bought roughly 24 years ago, even today it still redirects to Amazon.com.
It's amazing that the company now controls almost half of all print book sales
in the US.
Ebooks, e-readers, and
digital publishing
While Amazon
grew in the ‘90s mainly thanks to its growing share of the print book market
and its dominance of online book sales, it was its early venture into ebooks
and e-readers that turned it into a digital publishing and book-selling
powerhouse. Amazon began work on its first Kindle e-reader starting in 2004
under codename Fiona, with its internal Lab126 hardware division leading the
product development process. The first device was released in November of 2007
and sold for $399. Amazon has since released a wide range of the Kindle, and it
now dominates the e-reader market after edging out competing products from
Barnes & Noble, Kobo, and others.
Shortly after
the first Kindle launched, Amazon initiated its Kindle Direct Publishing
platform to let authors self-publish and sell books on Amazon. Two years later,
the company launched its own suite of premium imprints called Amazon Publishing.
Amazon now oversees tens of millions of self-published works on its platform
and nearly two dozen imprints. In 2017, Amazon had more than 83 percent of all
US ebook sales.
Amazon Prime, Prime
Video, and original content
Amazon first
entered the media industry as a major online retailer in the late ‘90s. The
company began by selling CDs and DVDs to a burgeoning market of online shoppers
who the began turning to the internet for music and movies, before the technical
feasibility of streaming and the advent of the iPod. But it wasn’t until 2005,
with the initial launch of Amazon Prime, that the company began laying the
groundwork for a future digital media ecosystem that integrated directly into
its online store.
Prime
initially started as a two-day shipping membership for devoted Amazon shoppers,
and it didn’t add any additional benefits until 2011. However, since then,
Prime has grown into a subscription service with more than 100 million paid
users worldwide, while the service itself has evolved to include additional
perks over the years, including a Prime credit card now with 5 percent
cashback. (Amazon also operates Amazon Pay for purchasing online goods
elsewhere with your Amazon account, and the Amazon Cash service for translating
cash into store credit using a barcode, although neither are restricted to
Prime users.)
Amazon Prime
Video has grown into a veritable Netflix competitor
Perhaps the
most prominent Prime perk, however, is access to Amazon Prime Video. The
video-on-demand service started in 2006 as Amazon Unboxed but was rebranded in
2008 and integrated into the Prime service three years later, where it became a
huge selling point for Amazon’s annual subscription. It now boasts thousands of
free TV shows, films, and games, all accessible on every form of screens from
phones to big television screens.
Amazon
Studios, which was founded in 2010 to compete with Hulu and Netflix in original
programming, has become a powerhouse in Hollywood, taking home both Emmys and
Oscars and growing into a staple of the modern entertainment diet of many
Americans. Rounding out its position in digital media is the FireTV streaming
device, which Amazon first launched in 2014 to compete with Apple, Roku, and
other set-top box makers. The product has since been shrunk into a skinny HDMI
stick — Amazon still sells the box and now also a small, square-shaped Fire TV
Cube — and it remains one of the best-selling consumer electronics devices on
Amazon.com.
Smart speakers and AI
Amazon is
known today not just as the everything store, but as the creator of Alexa, one
of the most pervasive digital voice assistants on the market today. As an
extension of Alexa, Amazon has become more than just a seller of other people’s
products. It’s now a hardware maker (Fire Phone aside), having embarked on its
boldest product play since the original Kindle when it decided to develop its
own line of smart speakers to house its artificial intelligence software. Once
again, the division responsible for this piece of hardware was Lab126, Amazon’s
hardware arm that gave it the tools to dominate the e-reader market nearly a
decade prior.
The first Echo
came out in late 2014 as a Prime member exclusive, but in the four short years
since, Amazon has developed dozens of different smart home products that are
centered around the speaker and voice assistant format. Today, thousands of
products integrate with the company’s Alexa platform to make use of its voice
search and query capabilities. Just as it once foresaw e-commerce, streaming,
and cloud computing as the future of the internet, Amazon saw AI as not just
something that could live within the smartphone — as Apple established with
Siri and Google with its Assistant — but also in the home.
The Echo line
and its Alexa assistant are Amazon’s avenues into our physical lives and our
digital behaviors. With the data it collects, Amazon is able to better understand
how we shop and how we want the devices of the future to listen, respond, and
problem solves as if they were other human beings. Amazon has stiff competition
in this space, primarily from Apple and Google, but its early investments in
smart speakers and AI have helped Amazon overcome its absence in the key
consumer markets like mobile, search, and social networks. As a result, Amazon
has made early and tangible inroads in developing an ecosystem that customers
will find increasingly hard to abandon down the line.
Twitch and live streaming
Amazon was
never going to be able to compete with Google’s YouTube in user-uploaded video
content, and it didn’t have the social infrastructure of Facebook to become a
destination where people discuss their lives and share videos from around the
web. But what Amazon did have was the resources to purchase a company that was
poised to outrun both Facebook and YouTube to a new type of business:
live-streaming, in particular video games live-streaming. The pioneer of that
market was Twitch, which Amazon purchased in 2014 for just $1 billion.
Twitch started
in 2007 as a 24-hour live stream of co-founder Justin Kan’s life (he coined the
term “lifecasting”) called Justin.tv, but it became very clear very quickly that
live gaming content was more popular than pretty much anything else. In 2011,
Twitch spun off gaming-centric channels as Twitch.tv, and it grew exponentially
as online games and the technology to broadcast them live on the internet
became more widespread and popular.
Amazon, seeing
the obvious opportunity here, reportedly outbid none other than Google to
become Twitch’s parent company three years later, with the AWS infrastructure a
big part of why Twitch CEO Emmett Shear decided to take the deal. Now, four
years later, Twitch has outlasted both YouTube and Facebook’s attempts to
snatch away its market share and, given the popularity of titles like Epic
Games’ Fortnite, has become an even more integral fixture of modern online life
and youth culture. Amazon has more recently integrated Twitch into its Prime
subscription, giving subscribers free games and complementary channel
subscriptions.
Groceries, household
supplies, and ever-faster shipping
While Amazon
was expanding into streaming video, hardware, and cloud computing, it
simultaneously maintained an aggressive push into even faster shipping and all
new retail formats. The company started its same-day shipping initiative, Prime
Now, in New York City in 2014, and it’s since expanded it to dozens of cities
around the world. Around the same time, Amazon began a program called
AmazonFresh to stock and ship groceries — including vegetables and refrigerated
and freezer products — that it used as a way to stay competitive with
traditional big-box retailers like Walmart and Target and Uber-like logistics
newcomers like Instacart. The company now sells its own line of meal kits
through Fresh to rival ready-to-cook options from companies like Blue Apron and
Plated.
With Prime
Pantry, which also launched in 2014, Amazon honed its focus on competing with
the Walmarts and pharmacies of the world by giving Prime subscribers an easy
way to fill one giant box with household supplies and other nonperishable
goods. In 2015, Amazon launched a home services arm for everything from house
cleanings and oil changes to furniture assembly and theater installation.
Amazon’s move
into offline retail has started a war with Walmart
That same
year, the company launched Dash buttons for instant reordering of products like
laundry detergent, and it’s more recently been investing in new services that
let package-carrying couriers unlock the truck of your car and even your front
door. Most recently, Amazon has signaled an intention to disrupt health care by
purchasing online pharmaceutical startup PillPack. All of this has helped
Amazon grow its North American retail operation at an unbelievable pace; annual
sales for the division more than doubled from $50.8 billion in 2014 to $106.1
billion last year.
Yet the more
monumental retail push occurred last summer, when Amazon purchased grocery
chain Whole Foods for $13.7 billion and proved, yet again, that Bezos is
willing and able to buy his way into a new market when it’s unfavorable to
start from scratch. Amazon now uses Whole Foods’ grocery pick-up and delivery
perks and in-store discounts as a way to reward its Prime subscribers. It’s
also using its massive resources to lower Whole Foods prices, making it more
competitive with Kroger, Target, and Walmart. In response, Walmart has begun
investing heavily in e-commerce and grocery delivery to protect its turf from
Amazon, setting the stage for an unprecedented retail war.
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