Amazon's current market capitalization has reached $1.11 trillion, ranking third in the world after Apple and Microsoft. And his founder, Bezos, replaced Bill Gates as the world's richest man for several years before Musk's sudden explosion.
If you pull the time progress bar back to 27 years ago, when the world's largest e-commerce platform was just established, you will find that its survival is inseparable from two words - "boldness".
From the founder to the company's management team, the pattern is so large and the ideas are strange that people have to clap their hands and praise.
Amazon headquarters office
In early 1994, Network traffic on the WorldWideWeb increased by 2,000-fold over the same period, an explosive increase that heralded endless business opportunities. At that time, Microsoft, as a software development giant, did not even have its own portal, let alone develop an online search engine. Instead, a young computer scientist working on Wall Street picked up the pie, and he was Jeff Bezos.
The e-commerce site that Bezos started was called Cadabra. At that time, Bezos was still a Nine-to-Five worker on Wall Street, and he only occasionally tinkered with his website after work, because he always felt that this thing was promising.
In early December 1994, Bezos resigned as vice president of the fund despite his family's objections — a year-end bonus of more than $100,000 if he had stayed on a monthly shift.
But Bezos's boldness and pattern made him not nostalgic for this huge wealth, because he wanted to take advantage of the Christmas and New Year's Day to open up the popularity of his e-commerce website.
Unfortunately, the effect is average, just reaching the consumer from scratch.
In 1995, Bezos changed the name of the shopping site to Amazon.
He named his company Amazon because the Amazon River is the world's largest river, and he wants his company to become the world's largest retailer, able to meet all the needs of its customers. He later admitted that he only had a grand blueprint in front of him and did not know how to achieve it.
Let's start by selling books.
In the first week, Amazon sold $12,000, but only managed to ship $846 of books. By the second week, Amazon had shipped $7,000 in books, and sales had risen to $14,000.
But the problem soon appeared, and most of the orders were too late to be processed, and Bezos was in a hurry.
Management had to work overtime every night, when the company didn't have enough desks, and no one had time to buy a desk, so they simply sat down on the floor and worked.
Bezos once boasted about "Haikou" to customers, Amazon has up to millions of books, and if customers are not satisfied, they can also enjoy unconditional return refunds within 30 days. This promise is very impressive, but Bezos has never thought about how to implement it, he just wishful thinking that his managers can definitely help him.
But his team is also a "newcomer", they are also the first time to contact the industry, have not encountered such a problem, a little more orders, everyone is messed up.
And at this time, the second week of Amazon's opening, Bezos received an email from Yahoo founders David Ferro and Jerry Yang, who wanted Bezos to agree to Yahoo adding an Amazon link to its homepage.
Experts on Bezos' team warned Bezos not to play with fire and self-immolation, and working with Yahoo would inevitably overstimulate sales, making orders far beyond Amazon's ability to bear. However, Bezos did not hesitate to accept Yahoo's proposal.
Orders swept in like a flood to Amazon employees. Bezos's office was also a mess, like a garbage dump. Once Bezos took a sip of the cappuccino that was on his desk and nearly poisoned himself, and it turned out that the coffee was a week ago and had been moldy.
When Brad Stone was writing biographies of Amazon and Bezos, he wanted to interview employees about that unusually chaotic period, but they couldn't remember anything, and severe lack of sleep led to a direct "loss" of memory.
In 1997, Zoe gave a lecture at Harvard Business School, where he introduced Amazon to the faculty and students in the audience. At that time, Amazon was just a stream, and it had not yet developed into a network giant. Most Americans have never heard of it, and even those who do know it are less afraid to buy on Amazon with a credit card for fear of being stolen personal information. Harvard Business School students are the future business elite, they can judge the huge development potential of e-commerce, but they are not optimistic about Amazon, they are optimistic about Amazon's strong rival - Barnes & Noble Bookstore.
In 1996, Barnes & Noble's sales were as high as $2 billion, while Amazon had only $16 million. From 1992 to 1997, Barnes & Noble seized half of the independent bookstores. In the eyes of publishers, Barnes & Noble Can Decide the Fate of a Book.
Before becoming famous, Amazon and Bezos fought two very famous "battles", both of which directly beat the boss of the industry and then completely occupied the online channel territory of their business.
One of them was with Barnes & Noble Bookstore.
This contest with Barnes & Bros. Bookstore lasted longer and was more tortuous, and this article will not be described in detail, and a separate article will be written later to introduce it to everyone.
Here we highlight another, more straightforward and bold "battle."
In this battle, Amazon's opponent is Toys R Us, the world's largest toy retailer.
Although Toys R Us was an offline chain, the company also set up its own online sales website in the midst of the Internet boom in the United States at the time. And it turned out that their online sales were also very hot at that time.
In 1999, Amazon began to expand its business, selling products online from books to kitchenware and toys.
The company held a media meet-up in New York, hoping to show off its stock of toys to the public through the media. But Bezos found that his subordinates purchased too few toys to shock the media and audiences, and he was furious and reprimanded his employees: "Do you want competitors to laugh at us?" Pathetic! ”
The boss was angry, and the purchasing supervisor panicked, because he knew that in another week it would be Christmas, and if this opportunity was delayed, how serious the loss would be to the company.
But in such a short period of time, emergency procurement from the factory can not be produced immediately, and it involves so many kinds of toys, so many manufacturers.
What to do?
The purchasing supervisor had to walk into Bezos's office to ask for instructions.
That night, Bezos held an emergency meeting of all employees, and at the meeting gave a proposal that made everyone present shocked their jaws: the purchasing department investigated and identified the 50 best-selling items in all Toys R Us stores in one day and made a list. All the management had to take out all their savings and swiping all their credit cards within three days, and go to the Toys R Us store to buy them all out; Ordinary employees who also participate in the purchase with their own funds can receive an additional 5% interest reward. All of the above purchase funds are pledged by all the property of Bezos and Amazon.
Everyone thinks that the boss must be crazy to do this, on the one hand, go directly to the store to purchase, the cost must be much higher than the factory purchase, even if all sold, it is not profitable, and even may lose money; On the other hand, Toys R Us is Amazon's biggest competitor, you go directly to the competitor's store to purchase at the sales price, which is not equivalent to directly contributing performance to the opponent and suppressing yourself in disguise? Could it be that Bezos is too inflated to think that Amazon is long-lived?
No one expected that the result would be the opposite.
Because all of Toys R Us's explosive inventory was purchased by Amazon in a short period of time, many of their customers on the online sales site ordered toys but could not receive the goods, and R Us was fined $350,000 by the Federal Commerce Commission for not informing customers in advance.
Although Amazon's rush to buy has caused the company a huge loss, they have also won something more valuable: the trust of customers. In the eyes of these customers, Toys R Us released their pigeons, and Amazon made good on its promise.
Since Christmas that year, Amazon has completely occupied the online market of Toys R Us, so that the super giant of the toy retail industry has to rely on Amazon's sales platform to develop its own online market.
In this battle, Amazon and Bezos won the battle.
There is no doubt that this is a victory for boldness and pattern.
This pattern has also made Amazon's future, even if in the next 21st century, when the United States encountered the Internet bubble, Amazon's counter-trend expansion and eventually became the absolute big brother of the industry, also thanks to The boldness of Bezos.
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