Word: ebay
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Jeffrey Preston Bezos had that same experience when he first peered into the maze of connected computers called the World Wide Web and realized that the 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...
...venture captures these new infonomics better than eBay, the four-year-old auction site. The eBay miracle isn't that it allows you to clean out your attic at a profit--though that's not a bad invention--but that it changes the whole way that we set prices. On eBay, buyers get to decide what something is worth, so objects migrate closer to their true value. Recently a Maine antiques store put an old-fashioned calculator up for sale on eBay for $100. Within a few days the calculator-loving collectors of the Web had bid the price...
Bezos is struggling mightily to make sure it doesn't kill Amazon too. Even as he cuts off competition like eBay by getting into the auction business himself (partnering with no less than Sotheby's), he is also trying to make Amazon a model of i-age shopping. When we buy one book, Amazon's computers can tell us what other people who bought that book purchased (and what they thought of those purchases). Or the site's users can look up the most popular books at their company or in their hometown. A few clicks from Amazon's home...
...doggie with selection. On the other side are e-malls such as Buy.com and Shopnow.com Traditional retailers are making the transition to the Web too, and one of them--Wal-Mart--could be letting a monster loose 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...
...daunting task. For three years, defining Amazon was easy: it sold books. Then it sold books, music and videos. Now it sells toys, home-improvement products, consumer electronics and software as well. Then there are the equity stakes in start-ups like drugstore.com pets.com and Gear.com and struggling eBay-wannabe divisions: zShops and Auctions. Who are these guys now? What does Amazon represent? And will the company's more than 13 million customers stick around for power drills and wide-screen TVs? "No one's sure where all this is going," says Carrie Johnson, an analyst with Forrester Research...