1997 On this day Amazon.com (AMZN) was first quoted on the NASDAQ. The firm was founded by the 30-year-old Jeff Bezos in 1994. A graduate of Princeton (Phi Beta Kappa), his background was in finance and computers, not books. Bezos started the company, as young Silicon Valley pioneers traditionally did, in his garage. Presumptuously, he called it ‘Amazon’ after the largest stream in the world.
Spurning San Francisco, the heart of the new online industry, he went further north up the coast to Seattle. Here he set up not the first, but what would soon become the biggest, web-bookstore: Amazon. com.
Bezos’s Amazon came on stream in 1995, at the same time that the home-based desktop computer became widely internet-connectable. Amazon soon diversified from books to a multi-product electronic-order/postal-supply retail business, combining old and new technologies. By cutting out the middleman bookshop, it allowed the purchaser to order from a millions-strong catalogue with large discounts. Efficient stock control was a further edge that the webstore had over the walk-in store.
After some bumpy years (the dot.com bomb rocked it) in which shares dropped as low as $1.50 from the initial $18 at the NASDAQ launch, the company’s value has grown inexorably. Bezos always maintained that he was in for the very long haul and warned investors to stay away if they did not want to stick with him. By 1999, he was Time magazine’s ‘Person of the Year’.
On 31 December 2008, Amazon was entered on the S&P 100 index, as one of the elite corps of American business enterprises. The following year, 2009, saw the launch of its Kindle reader – a delivery system that, it was expected, would cut out the need for physical delivery of book products. Given Bezos’s record, it would be a reasonable bet that he will succeed, making himself in the process the most influential bookman since Gutenberg.