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Amazon Evolution

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Amazon.com went public in 1997 and by 1999 Amazon.com had more market shares of the retail book business than the next two largest book store chains combined. When this took place Jeff Benzo made his intentions clear that he wanted Amazon.com to go from being the “Earth’s biggest book store” to the “Earth’s biggest anything store” (Academy of Achievement, 2010).

This retail internet business is considered an e-business or an e-commerce business. E-business includes any business activity conducted electronically between or within businesses, whereas e-commerce is defined to be the electronic interaction that enables the exchange of goods and their services. Amazon.com uses e-business for business to consumer (B2C) by using the internet to sell directly to the consumers. The consumers access the website, place their order, pay for the order, and then receive their order.

According to Rainer & Turban, by 2007 Amazon had spent over two billion dollars on infrastructure for its online store, but only 10% of its processing capacity is used at any one time. To make use of its unused processing capacity, Amazon has decided to offer storage and other services to other companies at a fee (2008). From this picture, it is clear that Amazon is not moving away from its core competency of being a leading online retailer rather it is making use of its infrastructure and resources to improve the profits.No comments

The strategy of Amazon is to provide online services as well as online retailing which would enable Amazon to compete with Microsoft and Google for their online services. Amazon only uses 10% or less of their systems capacity at any-one-time. Many of their customers went to Microsoft and Google because Amazon did not provide online services. By providing this online service and continuing with their online retails, this may help reestablish old

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