Word: point
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...will be at capacity within the next few years and will handle everything: washing machines, cars, rubber gaskets, Prozac, exercise machines, marmalade, model airplanes, everything but firearms and certain live animals. You name it, Amazon will sell it. "Anything," says Bezos, "with a capital A." And that's the point: Jeffrey Preston Bezos is trying to assemble nothing less than Earth's biggest selection of goods, then put them on his website for people to find and buy. Not just physical things that you can touch, but services too, such as banking, insurance, travel...
...world goes his way, Bezos could become even richer than his neighbor Bill Gates. Then what? "At some point," he says, giving MacKenzie a hug as the two of them stand around in the kitchen, "we want to figure out how to do philanthropic work that's highly leveraged. It's very easy to give away money ineffectively. But doing it well requires at least as much attention and energy as building a successful company...
...crates arrive at a central point where bar codes are matched with order numbers to determine who gets what. Your three items end up in a 3-ft.-wide chute--one of several thousand--and are placed into a cardboard box with a new bar code that identifies your order...
...themselves. Amazon.com added an auction site last spring. (It appears to be starting slowly; as of October, eBay had more than five times as many visitors as Amazon.com's auction site). Yahoo, the most visited site on the Web, introduced its own auctions last year. (Yahoo's big selling point: listing items is free.) And in September, Microsoft, Dell Computer and more than 100 other companies announced that they're linking their websites--and their 46 million users--in a new auction consortium run by FairMarket, a company that creates and runs online auction sites...
...freewheeling, authority-defying medium, and he was proud of his fledgling site's noncorporate orientation. "The first commercial efforts were from larger companies that were saying, 'Gee, we can use the Internet to sell stuff to people,'" he says. "Clearly, if you're coming from a democratic, libertarian point of view, having corporations just cram more products down people's throats doesn't seem like a lot of fun. I really wanted to give the individual the power to be a producer as well." eBay has hewed closely to this vision. It emphasizes community, and it doesn't run advertisements...