Who's writing the book on web business? (1996) | Hacker News Reader

Who's writing the book on web business? (1996)

fastcompany.com

29 points_bfhp8 comments

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."

"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.

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).

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.

"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'

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.

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.

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.

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