Amazon

I am reviewing the autobiography Seattle Memoirs by S Kalpanik which is a very good book which I downloaded for free from kindle. This lady was an employee at Amazon.com in Seattle, their headquarters and wrote this book about her experiences there. I think she worked in research or similar and prior to that worked in Silicon Valley for People Soft who made HR software, among other companies. Amazon was started by Jeff Bezos and some venture capitalists and initally was an online bookstore that then ventured into dvds & music. It was based in Seattle to be near one of its book suppliers. They initially wanted to call it cadabra as in abracadabra but thought it might be confused with cadaver and also in those days search engines listed results in alphabetical order and they wanted to be near the beginning. Amazon sells 10 million items per day and rather famously has a 99.999% efficiency standard which means 10 items might get mailed wrongly. Bezos did a course in book retail and the other students probably didn’t realize he was going to put a lot of them out of business. Amazon has 900,000 affiliates who are able to sell stuff on the site for a fee. Nowadays of course it has branched out into cloud computing with AWS of which it is the world’s largest provider and also ebooks with ebook readers and apparently sells more ebooks than books. There has been controversy over how managers still sometimes shout at there employees which let’s face it most companies do. This author joined the company because she saw it as an exciting opportunity. Amazon is one of the most profitable companies on the planet and bought China’s biggest online bookstore Joyo, for example and incorporated it into Amazon.cn. They also had an exclusive contract with Toys R Us for selling toys which did turn sour and both sides took each other to court although Toys R Us won their case. This book is very interesting and is around 200 pages which isn’t too bad and contains a lot of fascinating facts about Amazon.