
Who's writing the book on web business? (1996) - detcader
http://www.fastcompany.com/27309/whos-writing-book-web-business
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detcader
Specifically:

"You moved from New York to Seattle to start this business. Why?"

Bezos: "It sounds counterintuitive, but physical location is very important
for the success of a virtual business. ... Obviously Seattle has a great
programming culture. And it's close to Roseburg, Oregon, which has one of the
biggest book warehouses in the world. We thought about the Bay Area, which is
the single best source for technical talent. But it didn't pass the small-
state test. I even investigated whether we could set up Amazon.com on an
Indian reservation near San Francisco. This way we could have access to talent
without all the tax consequences."

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rboyce
"Amazon.com is not going to put bookstores out of business. Barnes & Noble is
opening a new superstore every four days. Borders is opening a new superstore
every nine days."

Well, that turned around pretty quickly. In 15 years Amazon went from "we
aren't really competing with brick-and-mortar bookstores" to putting Borders
out of business.

~~~
mtgx
I guess even Bezos didn't realize they're disrupting them, since the book on
disruption - Innovator's Dilemma - was written a few years later (although
Peter Drucker's "Innovation and Entrepreneurship" book had roughly the same
concepts in it, and was written decades earlier).

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codeulike
_Bill Gates laid it out in a magazine interview. He said, "I buy all my books
at Amazon.com because I'm busy and it's convenient. They have a big selection,
and they've been reliable." Those are three of our four core value
propositions: convenience, selection, service. The only one he left out is
price: we are the broadest discounters in the world in any product category.
But maybe price isn't so important to Bill Gates._

Nice.

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stevewillows
"I even investigated whether we could set up Amazon.com on an Indian
reservation near San Francisco. This way we could have access to talent
without all the tax consequences. Unfortunately, the government thought of
that first."

'Investigated' is a far cry from 'tried'

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eterm
Interesting how early on amazon had pegged personalized recommendations as a
key differentiator between the physical and online spaces.

What amazes me is how even 15 years later this is something that a lot of
online stores still do quite poorly.

~~~
mgkimsal
I had a couple friends in tech group at Borders back in the late 90's. I paid
a visit once, and had a guy show me a personalization/recommendation engine
he'd built - in his spare time - which was pretty damn good. It was
essentially a book 'locker' \- input all your book info - even stuff you
didn't buy at borders.com - and it would give you better recommendations,
news, etc.

Obviously could have been better, but he couldn't convince _anyone_ with any
power at Borders that this was even remotely useful for the company. He'd seen
this future and did a decent first pass of this in 1998/1999\. I believe he
left soon after that, and we see what happened to Borders.

This really touches on the 'lifestyle business' article currently on the front
page here, which had something like "sales and marketing are the #1 skill".
The older I get, the more this hits home. Your idea can be brilliant, but if
you can't sell people on it, you're never getting any traction.

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wusatiuk
you simply have to investigate their balance sheets, and you will know after a
couple of hours that they already know form the very beginning how to avoid
taxes, no matter in which country they are.

