They never saw it coming. Customers were streaming through the stores, sales continued to grow, and Americans in RVs were camping out in their enormous parking lots. The view from Bentonville, Arkansas was satisfyingly good.
Meanwhile, in faraway Seattle, Jeff Bezos started a company called Cadabra in his garage. It was 1994, and he had read a report that claimed, unbelievably, that this thing called the Internet would be the future of retail commerce. He compiled a list of 20 products he thought could be marketed online, and then narrowed it to the five he believed were most promising: compact discs, computer hardware, computer software, videos, and books. From the five, he chose books. When his lawyer suggested “Cadabra” sounded too much like “cadaver” he changed the name of the company, and Amazon was born. The first book sold on Amazon was, Fluid Concepts and Creative Analogies: Computer Models of the Fundamental Mechanisms of Thought.
Twenty years later, one of every two online shopping searches start directly on Amazon, and the company captures half of everything we spend online. Forbes magazine commented that Amazon’s “… market power now rivals or exceeds that of Walmart.”
Click here to read the full article here.
JAMO RUBIN, MD, CEO OF TAVHEALTH – LINKEDIN BLOG