Word: nets
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Today's frontier is hidden from the physical world, burbling and buzzing along the interconnected wires, routers and computers of the Net. But the possibilities for trade are far more fabulous than could ever have been imagined 100--or even 10--years ago. That's where Bezos comes in. His van rounds a corner, passes an airfield, heads down a two-lane road and pulls into a long driveway that leads to the biggest warehouse you've ever seen. The place is known as the Coffeyville Distribution Center, and Bezos (pronounced Bay-zos), who's never been here before...
...losing his pants. That's maybe the one thing people still really don't understand about the e-commerce revolution. If these are such hot businesses, then why are they hemorrhaging cash? Amazon--the company everyone wants to be like--could lose nearly $350 million this year. O.K., the Net is different, but don't profits and losses matter anymore? They do. Bezos insists Amazon's oldest businesses--books, music and video--will be profitable...
...sellers who had all the information, buyers are getting smarter and smarter. At sites like mysimon.com it's possible to go shopping and search not only Amazon but also the collections of two dozen other booksellers to find the best deal. And in coming years--heck, at Net speed, in coming months--it will be possible to find the cheapest price on just about anything: wines, CDs, perhaps even body parts...
...stretch it until it simply explodes and becomes meaningless to consumers? And how long can the money hold out? Bezos has already burned through a bank's worth of cash with no sign of slowing down. If anything, he's upping the ante--according to estimates, the company's net loss could be $350 million this year alone...
...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 be here...