Publications

Jul 6, 2005.

This week marks Amazon.com's 10th anniversary. Profit was down in the first quarter, and the stock price, after soaring to $60 a share last year, has slipped to a plateau of about half that. USA TODAY's Byron Acohido asked company founder and CEO Jeff Bezos about competing more directly against Google and Microsoft, impatient shareholders and what's ahead for e-commerce.

... Q: You're 10 years into this; what's your biggest surprise about how e-commerce has evolved?

A: It has gotten so much bigger, so much faster than I predicted 10 years ago - e-commerce has, and Amazon has. We didn't expect to build a company of this size 10 years ago.

Q: Why did it happen?

A: I think technology advanced faster than anticipated. In that whirlwind, a lot of companies didn't survive. The reason we have done well is because, even in that whirlwind, we kept heads-down focused on the customers. All the metrics that we can track about customers have improved every year. ...

Here is the rest of the interview.