In 1994, Jeffery Bezos noticed an important statistic about the Internet -- the fact that its usage was growing at 2300 percent a year. He was quick to become a part of such rapid growth; he began selling books on-line. He chose books over the vast number of products that could be sold on-line because of their volume. There were 1.5 million English-language books in print and 3 million books in all languages worldwide, while the largest physical bookstore in the world only carried 175,000 of the 1.5 million titles. Bezos made several decisions while starting his company; all of them seeming to be wise ones. For example, although it would seem unimportant for a virtual business, he was very selective in choosing a good location to start his business. He decided on Seattle: a place with lots of technical talent, near a large number of books; a nice place to live, and most importantly, it was in a small state -- to avoid customers having to pay sales tax due to the businesss presence in that state. Amazon.com was launched in July 1995. Sales picked up rapidly. By the end of 1996, its revenues reached $15.6 million, which was three times larger than the revenues of a large Barnes & Nobles superstore. The firm continued to expand and revenues continued to increase to a whopping $147 million in 1997. Despite the growth and huge revenues that Amazon.com made, the company still had net losses for 1996 and 1997. Bezos seems to have a good feel of the market. He has several services and functions that cater to the needs of the customers. His number one focus is customer service. Every decision, change, or acquisition that he makes is based, he claims, on making things better for the customer. After learning about Bezos technological and operational advances and efficiency, as well as his number one concern to satisfy the customer, one would wonder why his company is still experiencing loss year after year. One downside for Am...
