The Drivers of Success
The first substantive feature on Amazon.com that Fortune published was in December 1996. The title of that piece—“The Next Big Thing: A Bookstore?”—seems almost quaint in retrospect. Amazon.com, as the article explained, was “leading a wave of digital shops out to invade established industries,” a slew of upstarts taking on everything from publishing and stock trading to that most impregnable of advertising businesses, the telephone yellow pages. Amazon, the young prince in this domain, had no storefronts or pricey inventory to stock—back then, the company didn’t procure a title from a publisher or book distributor until after the customer had ordered it. Jeff Bezos, a former hedge funder who’d quit his Wall Street job, moved to Seattle, and managed to raise a tiny bit of seed capital to get his Internet…