Amazon's Pivot

Amazon hasn't just evolved over the years. Jeff Bezos also conjured some masterful pivots. The 10th in our series.

When Amazon.com anointed itself "the world’s biggest bookstore," with 1 million titles as it launched in 1995, Jeff Bezos, the company’s now-iconic founder, was already thinking about other markets to attack. Bezos never considered sticking solely to books. He wanted to rule e-commerce, which in the mid-'90s amounted to a rounding error on the balance sheets of major retailers. Which explains why three years later a troupe of Amazon publicists visited the forbes.com offices where I worked to offer me a personal demonstration of Amazon’s new music store. Unlike today, Amazon.com actually courted press coverage back then, just like every other dot com.

At the time there were a number of sites peddling compact discs, most notably CDNow and Music Boulevard, with the tongue-twisty domain name musicblvd.com. Each wanted to be, as Music Blvd. chief Larry Rosen once put it, “the Amazon.com of record sales.”

After seeing the elegant user interface and how straightforward and quick it was to order, say, a John Coltrane CD--and how much cheaper it was on Amazon than at the other sites--I told a friend at Music Boulevard, perhaps a bit inelegantly, that she’d better start sending out resumes. Soon after Amazon became the Amazon.com of record sales, changing its tag line to "Books, Music and More” and ultimately wiping CDNow and Music Boulevard off the map.

The speed of today's well-funded startups is brutal.

But it does allow for change in direction. This series explores those destiny-altering decisions made by companies that have gone on to great success. Read more about their course corrections--and alternate endings--here.

Naturally this doesn’t qualify as a pivot since it was part of Bezos’ grand plan from the get go. As he wrote in a 1997 letter to shareholders: “Our goal is to move quickly to solidify and extend our current position while w...

[Source: Fast Company]