How fast we forget......Amazon's Jeff Bezos: Time's Man of the Year, 1999
Wednesday December 22, 7:44 pm Eastern Time.
Going forward, Bezos predicts that "there will be thousands and
thousands of winners, not just a few," and "thousand and thousands of
failures."
It's a period of "experimentation," he said, justifyingly.
According to Media Metrix's figures, 5.69
million unique Internet users pointed their browsers at www.amazon.com during
the five-week shopping season. That's just shy of the combined traffic for the No.
2 and No. 3 ranked sites — eBay (EBAY), with 4.07 million visitors, and eToys
(ETYS), with 1.66 million.
After expanding into the world of toys, music and electronics — all under one
URL — Amazon is now notably more popular than the leading specialty sites,
like eToys, CDnow.com (CDNW) and Buy.com (expected to IPO in about a
month). And bookish rival Barnesandnoble.com (BNBN), which came in at No.
4 in the traffic report, saw less than a third of Amazon's numbers over the
holidays.
Bezos says Amazon will continue to build itself into an online superstore
where customers can find anything. Indeed, in the past few months, the
online behemoth has added many product offerings, such as software,
video games and home improvement products.
He hopes to have Amazon expand further into new categories in 2000
with more “hard-to-find” items and obscure book titles.
Bezos sees wireless shopping as an e-commerce hot spot in 2000 and
plans to expand the Amazon Anywhere program which is currently
accessible through Sprint PCS and the Palm VII. |
