Via WSJ:
The company's original name, Cadabra, was nixed after someone misheard it as "cadaver."
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Bezos moved the company to an industrial neighborhood that it shared with a needle-exchange program and a shuttered pawnshop. He had 1,100 square feet of office space on the second floor and 400 square feet in the basement to use as a warehouse. The desks were made from cheap doors, with sawed-off two-by-fours for legs. The warehouse could store just a few hundred books on their way from the distributor to customers.
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Three days after launch, Mr. Bezos got an email from Jerry Yang, one of the founders of Yahoo. "Jerry said, 'We think your site is pretty cool; would you like us to put it on the What's Cool page?' " Mr. Bezos later recalled. "We thought about it some, and we realized it might be like taking a sip from a fire hose, but we decided to go ahead and go for it." Yahoo put the site on the list, and orders soared.
By the end of the week, Amazon took in over $12,000 worth of orders. It was hard to keep up. That week, the company shipped just $846 worth of books. The following week brought in nearly $15,000 worth of orders, and the team was able to ship just over $7,000 worth of them.
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At launch, the site wasn't even truly finished. Mr. Bezos's philosophy was to get to market quickly, in order to get a jump on the competition, and to fix problems and improve the site as people started using it. Among the early mistakes, according to Mr. Bezos: "We found that customers could order a negative quantity of books! And we would credit their credit card with the price and, I assume, wait around for them to ship the books."
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In the very early days, Mr. Bezos had employees pick out the 20 strangest titles sold every week and awarded a prize for the strangest. Some of the winners: "Training Goldfish Using Dolphin Training Techniques," "How to Start Your Own Country" and "Life Without Friends."
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An elderly woman once sent an email to the company saying that she loved ordering books from the site but had to wait for her nephew to come over and tear into the difficult-to-open packaging. Mr. Bezos had the packaging redesigned to make it easier to open.
Great examples of how and why markets work. In order to be successful in a true free market, entrepreneurs are required to predict and respond to consumer demand. Amazon responded to a consumer complaint about packaging. When does this ever happen in government. There are many people out there who say that Obamacare is a bad law but we have no choice but to live with it. When does this happen in the private sector? If someone provides a bad product or service, if it is not corrected they will go out of business. When the Government provides a bad product or service, we are all told to suck it up and are forced to pay more money for it.
ReplyDeleteI think if the state didn't have control of the masses thru indoctrination centers called schools, the perception of the state as an authority on anything would eventually erode. It just takes a little force, fraud and time to turn people into sheeple.
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