Amazon, a company that began as an online bookstore, has now become a huge part of our lifestyle. Almost all of us are guilty of buying stuff from the e-commerce giant. Atleast 50% of all the shopping in the United States happens through Amazon. It is well ahead of its closest competitor, Ebay with 6.6%. It is obvious that this giant is now taking over the world. And it is surely not slowly. It has acquired more than 100 international companies. And the credit of this tremendous success goes to one man, Jeff Bezos. He has led this company to become the humongous internet giant that it is today!
Most may recognize him as the richest man in the world but he was also a pitchman of Taco Bell, the American fast food chain. His net worth currently soars well above $100 Billion. He has raced ahead of the business role models of many, like Bill Gates and Warren Buffet. He has led Amazon to seizing the epitome of not just e-commerce, but also digital ads, video streaming services, live streaming platforms, and many more!
But what is the secret to this astonishing success? Does it lie in their marketing campaigns? Customer Satisfaction? Easy- to-use system?
Go ahead and open a new tab, and type ‘relentless.com’ into your browser? You’ll be redirected to our friendly neighbour ‘Amazon.com’. But evidence shows that our friendly neighbour is not so friendly after all! The reason for this redirection is, CEO Jeff Bezos had almost named his company ‘Relentless’ according to a 2014 New Yorker profile. This name, although being later changed to ‘Amazon’ has been the hidden recipe for Amazon. This ‘relentless’ (pun-intended) strategy has paved the street from an online book-seller to an internet giant for Amazon! But what is this strategy, you ask? In theory, it is actually very easy to understand.
You must have heard of the well-known battle strategy ‘divide and conquer’. Many emperors have used it to expand the scope of their empires. Jeff Bezos, the emperor of e-commerce, uses a strategy which I have coined ‘demolish and conquer’. Amazon, since its formation, has taken down numerous competitors with this strategy. FedEx, Borders, Toys “R” Us, are some of them. Ofcourse, there are many who have debated this to be in bad faith.
The New York times wrote a lengthy article showing the strategy equipped by Amazon Web Services for cloud computing. AWS borrowed some tools and resources from the open-source software community in order to boost its massively profitable service which has resulted in the loss of smaller start-ups.
There is no doubt that this strategy is ruthless and so is the mastermind behind it. But there is no question about its effectiveness to date. Many predict that this growth stream is not going to stop anytime soon. This strategy has become the backbone of the company’s business ideology.
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