Wired For The Bottom Line

These concepts came together in 1994 after the Florida-born Bezos left a job as a financial strategist and flew to Ft. Worth, Texas, to pick up his father's 1988 Blazer. As his wife, MacKenzie, drove, Bezos hammered out his business plan on a laptop. The destination was Seattle, which offered an ideal employment pool of overeducated slackers.

Bezos's business plan originally met with skepticism, and even its author had doubts. "The big problem was not whether the technology would work," he says, "but whether customers would want to shop this way." He spent a year of planning before he opened the site, figuring out what would push book buyers into the digital age. His prime goals: providing a wide selection, good prices and an effortless experience.

Fortunately, Internet users then were early-adopter types, ready to take the virtual bungee jump into the new world of e-commerce. And as the Internet population grew, and increasingly resembled the country's overall demographic, word-of-mouse spread. In the last two years Amazon's customer list has grown from 2 million to 11 million.

In the process, Bezos and company have helped define the online shopping experience. In B&M bookstores you get to scan the stacks, order a latte and maybe impress someone with a bon mot about "Chicken Soup for the Soul." Bezos had to pioneer alternative pleasures. For those wishing to grab a certain item and split, Amazon is streamlined for speed. But there's also reason to hang out. On Amazon, information is entertainment--and a way to lure people into buying more. Simply by repackaging the data it generates--ranking books by sales, identifying other purchases by buyers of a certain tome and revealing the best sellers among "purchase circles" (in a given area code or company)--Amazon offers an automated, useful and effective means of generating recommendations. Not to mention reader reviews: Amazon posts 'em all, even negative ones. Why? Because Amazon's business is not selling things, says Bezos. "Our business is helping customers make purchasing decisions," he clarifies.