Word: days
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...easy to sit here today nodding about the power of electrified commerce. But back in the day when you--frankly, when everyone--was pooh-poohing the idea of online sales, there were a few folks who believed. One of them, on a summer day in 1994, quit his lucrative job at a New York City investment firm, packed up and, with his wife driving, made a now legendary voyage to Seattle to start what he thought would be a good business. By the time he arrived there he had a plan to sell books over the Internet. Investors thought...
...future of retailing was glowing back at him. It's not that nobody else noticed--eBay's Pierre Omidyar also knew he was on to something. But Bezos' vision of the online retailing universe was so complete, his Amazon.com site so elegant and appealing, that it became from Day One the point of reference for anyone who had anything to sell online. And that, it turns out, is everyone...
...when its new website debuts early next year. And don't forget eBay, the other e-commerce revolutionary. eBay's many-to-many approach to selling--the world is just one big auction--completely opposes Amazon's one-to-many, fixed-price universe. And it's been profitable from Day...
...pick a single eureka! moment, a time when suddenly everything became clear about what the future had in mind for Jeff Bezos, it was on a May day in 1994. The 30-year-old was sitting at the computer in his 39th-floor office in midtown Manhattan, exploring the still immature Internet, and he found a site that purported to measure Net usage. Bezos couldn't believe it: the Internet was growing at a rate of 2,300% a year. "It was a wake-up call," he says. "I started thinking, O.K., what kind of business opportunity might there...
Bezos needed to learn the book business fast. Fate was his handmaiden: the American Booksellers Association's annual convention was set for the very next day in Los Angeles. He flew out and spent the weekend roaming the aisles and taking a crash course in the business. Everything he learned encouraged him. The two big wholesalers for books were Ingram and Baker & Taylor. "So I went to their booths and told them I was thinking of doing this." Books, it turns out, are among the most highly databased items on the planet. The wholesalers even had CD-ROMs listing them...