When Amazon made their move into eCommerce, analysts and experts alike where questioning their possibilities of success. Where the business world was putting at doubt the future and importance of online-shopping, Amazon was looking at the bigger picture of simply being unable to physically achieve the promising size of an online business by conventional methods (i.e. bookstores and superbookstores), thus betting all their money on the new economy world the internet had brought with it. And Amazon sure did prove to have bet on the right horse …
By the end of 1998, Amazon had already expanded to further product categories such as Music CDs and Movies, opened up more distribution facilities and invested in various new promising markets such as the mobile shopping by cellphones. At this point, Amazon began acquiring more or less successful businesses either in direct competition to them, or at least of good use for their further expansion plans.
By now, Amazon has acquired over 50 various companies, amongst them some big names such as iMDB, CDNow, audible.com and just recently Zappos. Needless to say that, to the commonly interested reader, the actual history of Amazons acquisitions has become a bit of a confusing jungle, and keeping track of the whole picture is pretty time-consuming.
Let ‘Meet the Boss‘ come to rescue with their neat graphical help of all the acquisitions Amazon had made from 1995 to the recent date (2009). The graphical chart shows all the companies that had been “forced to join” the Amazon empire conveniently sorted by their date of acquisition, including the respective cost (if available/known).
In the video below Jeff Bezos talks about the acquisition of Zappos and a couple of simple tips’n’tricks for building a business. One of his most important ones is “Obsess over customers”.
What’s next Amazon?
All credits for the graphical chart herein presented goes to Meet the Boss, respectively the actual creator, who probably put quite some effort into researching all those facts.