Word: site
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...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...
...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 page will reveal, rather worryingly, that the three most frequent Amazon purchases in Los Alamos, N.M., are the biography of an East German spymaster, a book about...
There is, in all this, a kind of humanness that is exactly the opposite of what online shopping was supposed to be like. Amazon is not a depopulated, Logan's Run kind of store. The site allows readers to post their opinions about books, to rate products, to swap anecdotes. As you sit there reading, say, a literate and charming book review from Bangladesh, the real power of the Amazon brand comes home. It is a site that is alive with uncounted species of insight, innovation and intellect. No one predicted that electronic shopping could possibly feel this alive...
Bezos, naturally enough, is unmoved by the naysaying because he's convinced that as more customers come to his site, he'll be able to offer the lowest prices. And they will come because Amazon simply does the best job of helping them find stuff. But what if they use his site for research, then go elsewhere for the cheapest price? Bezos has considered that as well. And he has a possible solution: "Membership clubs!" he says. "If you want to see all the information we collect on Amazon--the customer reviews, the professional reviews and use our agenting technology...