July 29, 2013
News

The first thing you notice about Jeff Bezos is how he strides into a room.

A surprisingly diminutive figure, clad in blue jeans and a blue pinstripe button-down, Bezos flings open the door with an audible whoosh and instantly commands the space with his explosive voice, boisterous manner, and a look of total confidence. "How are you?" he booms, in a way that makes it sound like both a question and a high-decibel announcement.

Each of the dozen buildings on Amazon's Seattle campus is named for a milestone in the company's history--Wainwright, for instance, honors its first customer. Bezos and I meet in a six-floor structure known as Day One North. The name means far more than the fact that Amazon, like every company in the universe, opened on a certain date (in this case, it's July 16, 1995). No, Day One is a central motivating idea for Bezos, who has been reminding the public since his first letter to shareholders in 1997 that we are only at Day One in the development of both the Internet and his ambitious retail enterprise. In one recent update for shareholders he went so far as to assert, with typical I-know-something-you-don't flair, that "the alarm clock hasn't even gone off yet." So I ask Bezos: "What exactly does the rest of day one look like?" He pauses to think, then exclaims, "We're still asleep at that!"

He's a liar.

Amazon is a company that is anything but asleep. Amazon, in fact, is an eyes-wide-open army fighting--and winning--a battle that no one can map as well as its general. Yes, it is still the ruthless king of books--especially after Apple's recent loss in a book price-fixing suit. But nearly two decades after its real day one, the e-commerce giant has evolved light-years from being just a book peddler. More than 209 million active customers rely on Amazon for everything from flat-panel TVs to dog food. Over the past five years, the retailer has snatched up its most sophisticated competition--shoe seller Zappos and Quidsi, parent of such sites as Diapers.com, Soap.com, Wag.com, and BeautyBar.com. It has purchased the robot maker Kiva Systems, because robots accelerate the speed at which Amazon can assemble customer orders, sometimes getting it down to 20 minutes from click to ship. Annual sales have quadrupled over the same period to a whopping $61 billion. Along the way, incidentally, Amazon also became the world's most trusted company. Consumers voted it so in a recent Harris Poll, usurping the spot formerly held by Apple.

Read the full article here.

Fast Company