Starting from the earth's biggest bookstore, Amazon has transformed itself into a technology company. To be correct, Amazon.com has transformed itself into Amazon. If you were buying books from Amazon in the "dot com" era, would you have thought Amazon would be revolutionising the way we read? Could you predict they would change we store data, harness the power of remote computing and storage and pioneer in cloud computing? At that time, Amazon.com was a good place to buy book cheaper. Later we would have changed the term books into products. When eBay joined the fray with a business model, we would have wondered the fate of Amazon. Now years later, Amazon is standing tall, outgrown the birth script and metamorphosed into a juggernaut with different capabilities.
In this book, Brad Stone narrates the journey of Jeff Bezos from a school boy to the CEO of Amazon. Being a journalist and having done many cover stories on technology giants, Brad is the right person to write about the rise, the slump and the rise of Amazon. We might have heard many things in disjointed articles about the empty chair representing the customer in Jeff's meeting and leadership quotes which have been labeled under Jeffisms. If you are interested or associated with technology companies, the chances are you have already read these stories from multiple sources. But there are many things which haven't heard too. What Brad does is to package neatly all these into a story thereby making it easy for anyone to read it.
Jeff Bezos took a small idea and expanded it to make Amazon. He didn't undersell the idea even at the start. It wasn't about books alone although it was the first products featured on the websites. They have worked on the selection of the books and also on the logistics to get it delivered to you as soon as possible. Though Jeff is a brilliant visionary, his management style is not collaborative but authoritative. But his heart is in the right place. He believes the customer is the king. As a result, Amazon has adapted quickly to serve its customers. They have reworked the concept of fulfilment centers to reduce manual errors and predict the delivery time for the customer. They have been resilient despite having many issues in the formative years. Amazon has changed the way we read with Kindle. There are lots and lots of good stuff from Amazon.
I moved to Kindle (on smartphones and web) a long while ago. It has helped in reading lot more compared to pre-Kindle days. So I was naturally interested in knowing about this company. If you are like me whose life has been changed by Amazon even in a minor way, then this is a good book for you.
Tags: Books,Brad Stone,Jeff Bezos,Amazon
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