Word: amazone
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...troops are silent. Stunned. Amazon, profitable? It's autumn 1999. For years these people have been racing toward a horizon that no one, save perhaps their utopian-futurist boss, even really sees. They know much of the Silicon Valley/Wall Street/media complex believes the commodification of online retailing will lay their company to waste. Amazon the Web's golden child, darling of NASDAQ day traders who raise its market cap even faster than the company bleeds money, is also Amazon the avatar of all that may be ephemeral and fraudulent about the dotcom revolution. Now Bezos has named a date...
Bezos is beyond talking about his wealth or whether Amazon will be successful. Instead, he talks about a "nirvana" state of consumer service, in which you'll come to Amazon, and the one thing you've been looking for all your life will be featured on the page that day. You may not even know you've been looking for the thing or that it even exists, but since the site is so familiar with your consumption habits, it knows...
...says the trick to solving some of the world's problems is to think, Amazon-like, in the long term. "Say you want to solve world hunger. If you think in terms of a five-year time frame, you get really depressed; it's an intractable problem. But if you say, well, let's see how we could solve this in 100 years--it's a problem because you'll be dead by then, but the solution becomes more tractable...
...raptly while Jeff Bezos explains what it means. There are two types of businesses, he tells the troops: baby businesses, which need growth and feeding, and adult businesses, which must pay their own way. This brings him to B, M and V, which stand for books, music and video, Amazon's three oldest product lines. And the P is the news, for this trinity is nearing adulthood. "By the end of the year 2000," Bezos says, "we're going to make them profitable...
Their fearless leader notes their angst and offers a beneficent smile. "You can cheer," Bezos says. So the troops cheer. Imagine it. Amazon, profitable...