From its bookselling roots, Amazon.com expanded into general online shopping. It outlived the dot-com bubble of the late 1990s simply because Jeff Bezos’s business strategy ignored the get-rich-quick mentality that led to the downfall of so many companies. Recently, Amazon posted lower-than-expected third quarter results, which had a negative effect on its stock. But the cause of its lower results was not a slowdown in business or a public spurning of the new Kindle Fire — indeed, Amazon is manufacturing millions more Fires than they projected to meet high demand — it was because Amazon opened more shipping centers and hired more employees than it expected to.
Bezos, in moving Amazon to the next stage of dominance in the technology industry, seems to be focusing on two fronts in addition to his already-secure online shopping kingdom. The first, cloud computing known as Amazon Web Services, provides businesses and individuals with low-cost application hosting, backup and storage, web hosting, and content delivery. Pew Research Center has forecast that most computing work will be done through cloud-based services by the year 2020, giving Amazon a head-start on what promises to be a competitive field.
Second, Bezos has turned his eyes to tablet computers. While he probably could have allowed the Kindle family of products to remain relatively unchanged, to remain a method of reading e-books and little more, the 2011 introduction of the Kindle Fire puts Amazon into more direct competition with Apple, Inc.’s iPad line. With news of 95,000 first day preorders alone, it’s safe to say that the Fire represents a credible threat and another smart move on Bezos’s part.
Where will Jeff Bezos take Amazon next? It’s almost impossible to predict. As with its cloud computing platform and the Kindle Fire, Bezos moves with the natural, though risky, progression of his technology.