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Bezos Says the Internet is Still Evolving
According to many, online retailer amazon.com is the poster child of Internet enterprises. But president & CEO Jeffrey Bezos doesn't see his business as just an electronic bookseller. He says it takes a wider vision to exploit the opportunity available to businesses on the Internet.
"The Internet and e-commerce is in its very early days of evolution," said Bezos. "This is like the Cambrian era 530 million years ago where you had this big dislocation where single celled life first started expanded to multi-celled life. What you saw at that time you had the greatest rate of speciation. And you have certainly seen that over the last several years with all different experiments tried. With all these Internet companies, all these dot coms."
Not only was the Cambrian era the greatest rate of speciation but it was also the greatest rate of extinction. Bezos thinks the same scenario will work out for electronic commerce. "I think we're still at the Kitty Hawk stage of e-commerce. I don't think we're even at the biplane stage yet."
One of the factors that Bezos feels will influence the development of e-commerce is expanded broadband access in the US and internationally. "Five years from now at amazon.com for example, we'll be able to use 60 times the bandwidth per customer and yet the bandwidth costs will remain roughly the same."
Bezos said that customer acceptance fuels technology innovation, and innovation increases acceptance. He used the explosion of cell phones as an example. "Why are cell phones so common now and so rare back then?" he asked. "It's because the customer experience has gotten so much better. Cell phones used to be the size of cinder blocks and the battery gave power for 5-10 minutes." He maintains that as e-commerce technology improves, more shopping will move online.
The Internet can be expected to change the way people shop, but it won't change human nature. "I've seen countless business plans that call for human nature to change for it to work. That's usually a sign that at its core it's not a good value proposition," he laughed. Evenutally he says "I think over time that 15% of shopping will move online."
Amazon.com is arguably the Internet's largest online retailer and has seen exponential growth in sales, although profitability continues to lag. That's to be expected with any large startup according to Bezos. Online shopping using the Internet will be especially important to rural America.
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Related Links | |
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| Webmonkey | ||
| Builder.com | ||
| Workz.com | ||
| Nielsen Norman Group | ||
| Allec.com | ||
| Macromedia | ||
| e-storefront.com | ||
| Advisor |
