PROFILE AMAZON
IS THERE anything Amazon can't flog? When the online retailinggiant took its first uncertain steps on to the web, in the summer of1995, it sold only books, and not very many of them. Today it sellseverything from petrol lawnmowers to penis- enlargement pills (inthe contraception corner, weirdly). It also offers food, cosmetics,jewellery, clothes, electronics, power tools, industrial music,industrial wall tubing, speedboats - products that hundreds ofmillions of people spend billions of dollars on each year.
Recently Amazon has had its head in the clouds. The reasonemerged this week when it unveiled its latest plan to change the waywe consume. Its new Cloud Drive is an online service allowingsubscribers to store music on Amazon's web servers rather than ontheir own computers; they can then access their files on an Androidsmart phone or computer from anywhere in the world with internetaccess.
The Cloud Drive, available only in the US for now, givescustomers five gigabytes of free storage - enough for about 90 hoursof music - and can be upgraded to 20GB with the purchase of digitaldownloads via the Amazon website.
Once installed, the software automatically pulls all your musicfrom wherever it sits on your computer and places it on thecompany's servers for your listening pleasure.
Amazon has beaten its rivals Apple and Google to the punch. ItsCloud Player should benefit from first-to-market advantage whilepublicly stating the company's intention to reposition itself as anentertainment destination as opposed to just another, albeit huge,online retailer.
It is hoping its cloud has a silver (or gold) lining and will bea game-changer. It wouldn't be the first time Amazon changed thegame. It has been a relentless and powerful force for changing theway we consume since it was set up in a garage (all the best webcompanies start in a garage) by Jeff Bezos in Seattle in 1995. Heborrowed $300,000 for what he hoped would be "Earth's biggest bookstore".
The first book he sold was the soporific-sounding Fluid Conceptsand Creative Analogies: Computer Models of the FundamentalMechanisms of Thought. But from such weighty tomes grow wildlysuccessful companies; 16 years later Amazon has more than 100million customers. Earlier this year analysts projected its revenuewould jump by 200 per cent to about $100 billion by 2015.
For the first three years Amazon sold nothing but books, with asmall staff of book lovers writing earnest reviews of the productsthey sold. Then, legend has it, Bezos got an e-mail from a customerthat changed the company's course dramatically. The sender of themessage, thrilled skinny by the ease with which he had found anobscure book on the site, e-mailed Bezos to suggest he launch asimilar online service for CDs.
Months later Amazon was the web's biggest music retailer. It is areflection of the dotcom madness that gripped the US in the late1990s that it took just four years for Bezos to go from pennilessentrepreneur in a cold and wet garage in Seattle to Time magazine'sbillionaire "person of the year".
While the Amazon curve has been mostly upward, it hasn't been allplain sailing. In 2009 it was forced to apologise after thousands ofTwitter users voiced concerns about its decision to remove from itsrankings and from some search results selected gay and lesbianbooks, including serious non-fiction, academic works and novels. Itlater blamed a "ham-fisted" cataloguing error for the problem.
Then last year it got into more hot water. In a move worthy ofBig Brother it dipped into the Kindle e-readers of some customers inthe dead of night and remotely deleted recently purchased digitaleditions of two books. Amazon said the books had been added to itsstore by a company that did not have rights to them. It wasunfortunate that the two books the company decided to erase fromreader's machines, if not their memories, were George Orwell'sAnimal Farmand Nineteen Eighty-four.
In 2003 a former employee, James Marcus, wrote a book about thecompany called Amazonia: Five Years at the Epicenter of the Dot.ComJuggernaut. He eloquently described "the MBAs, the bean counters andthe PR operatives" who joined after the company's initial publicoffering, in 1997. The first thing they did, he said, was to pushaside worthy book reviews to make space for racier products, such aslingerie and, er, kitchen appliances.
Marcus wrote witheringly about the way Amazon dropped its much-loved in-house, independent book reviews in favour of readers'reviews, which were frequently written by friends of the author or,if they were particularly shameless, the authors themselves.
Personalisation software became the norm,tracking users'interests and modifying pages to reflect those interests so as toincrease sales. Then there is the Kindle, the e-book reader that isdoing, albeit more gradually, to the humble book what the MP3 playerdid to the CD.
"The question is, can you improve upon something as highlyevolved and well-suited to its task as the book? And if so, how?"Bezos asked in 2007. In the months after its launch it took the USby storm and, with its wireless access to thousands of (relatively)low-cost downloadable books and newspapers, Bezos claimed it waswell equipped to see off "the last bastion of analog". Last year e-books outsold hardback books on the site for the first time.
Amazon is now getting into apps. It will launch an app store forAndroid phones within weeks, and it plans to compete with Google fora slice of the increasingly lucrative app pie. But this week Bezosis hoping Amazon can secure a beachhead with Cloud Drive, giving itan edge over other players in the market and allowing the biggestbookshop on earth to become even bigger.
Curriculum vitae
What is it? A shop. A huge shop. But not only that: now it's anentertainment destination in its own right. Like Dr Quirky's GoodTime Emporium. Kind of.
Why is it in the news? Amazon has just unveiled its Cloud Drive,which will allow users to store days' worth of music remotely on itsservers.
Good news Amazon is cheaper than the bricks-and-mortar shops inour towns and less hassle to get to. Storing our tunes on itsservers means we can access them wherever we go.
Bad news If we only ever shop on Amazon our bricks-and-mortarshops will close, jobs will be lost, and our towns and cities willturn into urban wastelands where wild dogs will roam. If thecompany's servers crash they may take our tunes with them.
Do say Oh I just love Amazon. It meets all my entertainment needsand is so competitively priced.
Don't say Penis enlargement pills? Seriously, what are youpeople? A bunch of snake-oil salesmen?
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