Amazon turns 30 – what will the next decade bring?

Amazon started life as an online bookseller operating out of a garage in Seattle. What does its future hold?

the American electronic commerce and cloud computing company Amazon (NASDAQ: AMZN) logo seen displayed on a smartphone with a graph in the background.
(Image credit: SOPA Images / Contributor)

In 1994 Jeff Bezos, a Wall Street investment manager who had just turned 30, quit and moved to Seattle to start a business from his garage. On 5 July 1994, he incorporated his company in Washington State under the name Cadabra, but changed it to Amazon, because (according to company legend) a lawyer had misheard its original name as “cadaver”. 

When Amazon began trading a year later, Bezos’s hunch that books were the perfect product for an e-commerce start-up was proved correct. Within two months, Amazon – billing itself as “Earth’s biggest bookstore” – had revenues of $20,000 a week. In 1998, the company – already diversifying its product offer – changed the slogan to “Earth’s biggest book and music store”. 

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Simon Wilson’s first career was in book publishing, as an economics editor at Routledge, and as a publisher of non-fiction at Random House, specialising in popular business and management books. While there, he published Customers.com, a bestselling classic of the early days of e-commerce, and The Money or Your Life: Reuniting Work and Joy, an inspirational book that helped inspire its publisher towards a post-corporate, portfolio life.   

Since 2001, he has been a writer for MoneyWeek, a financial copywriter, and a long-time contributing editor at The Week. Simon also works as an actor and corporate trainer; current and past clients include investment banks, the Bank of England, the UK government, several Magic Circle law firms and all of the Big Four accountancy firms. He has a degree in languages (German and Spanish) and social and political sciences from the University of Cambridge.