Amazon.com has become perhaps my favorite company, despite two times when I was really, really ticked at them. The first time was when I ordered a download for twenty bucks and discovered as soon as I ordered it that I could have gotten it free from another source. No amount of whining would get my twenty bucks back. The second time was when Amazon lowered the price of my Sony Alpha 350 camera by 100 bucks just a few days after I got mine. Again, no luck. Had that been any price-matching retailer, I would have got my 100 bucks back.
But while I still think Amazon owes me $120, the benefits of Amazon still outweigh these two issues. I started ordering books from Amazon as soon as they opened an online book store. As I recall, they struggled for years with big deficits each year before they imaginatively began expanding and creatively adding multiple lines of products to their inventory.
Heather Green reports in Business Week's internet site of January 30 2009 that Amazon has "crushed the Street's expectations by snaring customers and snapping up market share as traditional merchants foundered." Now Amazon will soon announce the next edition of the Kindle, the electronic book reader. You can read the Business Week article here. Amazon provides one more example of how innovation and moving out of old ruts and established ways of doing things are critical in the annals of changing and emerging business history.
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