Customer Reviews

Amazon.com: Get Big Fast

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(7)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

This is an unauthorized account of an e-commerce leviathan's rise from obscurity. So, if one is looking for a detailed business module or a blue print of its technology, look elsewhere, as this is not the book for you. What this book offers is a very interesting, well-organized narrative on the early, heady days of Amazon.com. when it was just an upstart internet bookseller looking to make its mark big time, as well as a look at its founder, Jeff Bezos, painting a flattering and intriguing portrait of this now multi-billionaire.

For its founder, Jeff Bezos, it was not, however, just about the money. If that were the case, he would never have left his seven figure Wall Street job. For him, it was about the opportunity to be on the ground floor of a business that would change the retailing community forever. Jeff Bezos, a true visionary, chose to take that challenge, and in doing so, he would forever change the dot.com world and the retailing community. The author, a business reporter for various publications, delineates just how it was that Jeff Bezos did so.

This book offers up an interesting summary on how Jeff Bezos was able to take the online community by storm and upset the status quo. The author provides a biographical narrative on who Jeff Bezos is. It is grounded in the context of where he grew up, his schooling, as well as his early interests. It segues from his Ivy League educational underpinnings to his foray into the upper echelons of Wall Street, deriving the experience that he needed in order to take on the risky proposition of starting up his own dot.com company. It is clearly the story of a visionary and decision maker with heart.

The book succinctly details the rise of Amazon.com as an e-commerce force with which to be reckoned. It tracks its growth and change from an upstart, fledging, by- the-seat-of-its-pants-company to one that is now a staple of the popular lexicon. It superficially explores the philosophy of Jeff Bezos in terms of having his business "get big fast" and the technological, financial, and logistical hurdles that the business needed to overcome in order to do so. The author also keys in on the ability of Jeff Bezos to think out of the box, when so many business pundits said that what he sought to do could not be done.

The overall texture of this book is enhanced by Information provided by those with some insider knowledge, such as those who knew Jeff Bezos, those who worked with him in those early halcyon days, rival "brick and mortar" executives, business analysts, and financiers, among others. This book, which is a look at a visionary and his company, details how that visionary was able to transform his company into a veritable cultural phenomenon unto itself. Those who are devotees of Amazon will find this well-written book heady stuff, indeed, as it makes for absorbing reading.

While many who are reading this review are probably interested in the website story, this book is probably not the one to read. The author did not have access to Jeff Bezos and many other key players when writing this book, and the lack of first hand information shows.

It reads like a detailed, outsiders view of the history of the company. This happened, then that happened, then the site did this other thing. There is very little discussion of *why* these events and actions were important. And most importantly, very little context as to how the site changed the face of internet commerce.

This book is certainly not the definitive work on [site], which is still to be written. A better (and funnier) look at the internals of Amazon can be found in "21 Dog years - Doing time at Amazon.com".

This book does a great job at telling the Amazon.com story. Nice to hear that an entrepreneur actually planned their business and didn't just get lucky.

Now that we've hit 2005, it would be great to get another update (the current final chapter is a bit of an update from couple of years ago). What is the story behind their profit? Stock? The door desks?

Overall....a good, quick read.

This book is ten years out of date and unfortunately this makes the content very boring to read. Amazon has come a long way in the last ten years and a newer book documenting the company progression would make far more interesting reading.

As a historical insight into the critical decision making processes involved in business back then, some may find it interesting reading, but the world of Internet business moves and changes at such a rapid rate that I just found it to be outdated and irrelevant. I don't recommend it.

Spector provides a compilation of magazine articles which talk about very early history of Amazon and Bezos but without any insights on how Amazon got so big or the strategic decision made by the company along the way. In 2011, when I writing this review, the material in the book is quite old and mostly irrelevant for Amazon's success over last 8 years. Not worth spednign the time reading it - I got the book for free but I decided to trash it after reading less than half (but enough to form an opinion about it)

This is a very well told account of the first few years in amazon.com history. The book sets the stage by providing a brief biography of Jeff Bezos, the visionary master mind behind amazon.com, as well as a brief history of the internet and the book-business prior to amazon.com. The book then follows amazon.com from its conception in Jeff's mind and through the numerous challenges it had to get over up until its IPO and as it expanded beyond the book business. The book describes in gripping style the creativity, sweat and blood that was invested in making amazon.com what it is today. The book puts a lot of emphasis on amazon's business model and how it evolved over the years. I find this book an essential read for anyone seeking to launch an internet based startup or any startup for that matter! Truth be told, I find the story exceptionally motivational for just about anyone.

On the down side; the book is several years outdated and with a company as dynamic as amazon, this means a severely incomplete picture. In addition, the book doesn't pay enough attention to amazon's websites, their features and evolution over the years. Moreover, there is not even a cursory introduction to the technical breakthroughs (e.g. amazon's recommendation system) that make amazon.com such a revolutionary user experience.

BOTTOM LINE: If you are interesting in amazon's launch phase and the lessons it offers, this is the book you are after. If you are looking for a comprehensive history or the company or for deeper insights into its websites and their backing technoogies then I suggest you look elsewhere.

This book really conveys the drama of the creation and building of Amazon.com by Jeff Bezos. Its really a biography of Amazon's founder, Jeff Bezos, through about 1999, ending before the .com crash.

There are a couple parts where the story drags, but generally, there was much more drama and interest than I expected. The story is skillfully told and the writing is clear, and after reading this book, I intend to look for the others that this author, Robert Spector, has written.

I strongly recommend this to anyone who wants to track the rise of Amazon.com. It was published too soon to provide the author with the opportunity to analyze the aftermath of the fantasticly overheated internet marketplace that led to the dot.com bust, but you can see how he examines all the elements from the perspective of 1999. Spector doesn't forecast the fall, but you can see all the excess and unmistakable signs of what is to come. I would love to see a Second Edition.

More than 4 years after the dotcom crash, we should be getting some perspective on internet companies. Perhaps most fundamentally, what does it take to build a highly profitable internet company? Which companies are still overvalued? Are they 50% overvalued, 10x overvalued or what? Sadly, books offering such wisdom do not seem to be around. There are plenty of books about the disasters, but much more interesting would be an analysis of the handful of successes or maybe-successes.
In the absence of such a work, this is respectable. It is well-written and carefully researched. It was finished in 2000, when things were starting to fall, but still had a long way to go. So you had to be unusually perceptive to see things clearly. Spector does seem to have seen most of the issues, he just does not push them far enough.
There is much fascinating detail and much to learn, although you sometimes have to read between the lines. For example, Amazon's software should be an engineering case study in the difference between effective and efficient. It was incredibly inefficient, because the original designers (by their own admission, according to Spector) knew nothing about the finer points of relational databases, but it was effective - it rarely went down. Since Amazon was able to raise money on absurdly favourable terms, the fact that poor software design gave a huge hardware bill maybe did not matter much.
I guess I have found Amazon the single most puzzling, most confusing, and hence most interesting dotcom company. I have fairly consistently been wrong in my predictions. I thought it would be mainly a back-catalogue business (because that is what I mainly use it for); I was wrong - although it currently seems to be making renewed efforts to expand that segment. I thought its costs would be far lower than Barnes & Noble; I was wrong. I thought the attempt to sell everything was just a cynical move to fool investors; I was wrong, in one quarter electronics outsold media.
But the jury is still out on long term profitability etc, so this is an interesting source of information.

Funny that you're reading a review of Amazon.com on Amazon.com.

The author had access to a number of key players in the startup phase of the firm. He uses this to great effect, giving us a very clear and you-are-there feel to the startup phase of the firm. There are great stories about looking for cheap office space, engineers trying to create software that will be robust but also deliver it on time so they can have customers, trying to get funding when nobody knows who you are and nobody understands your business plan (what the heck is this Internet anyway?). Having surived a different startup around the same time, writing Perl code to deliver products on the web, all the trials and tribulations that Amazon went through feel very authentic and real.

This is bar none the best book on the Amazon.com startup phase. This would've garnered 5 stars.

Unfortunately, the book relies less on first-hand players and more on press releases and public knowledge after the IPO phase. In fact, the author starts one chapter with the following apology: "The following reads like a shopping because it is a shopping list." The chaper is devoted to the post-IPO shopping spree where Amazon bought various other Internet startups, most of which bombed.

In addition, the latter chapters lack the insight and analysis that made the earlier chapters a joy to read. For example, how could a corporate culture of fanatical thriftness spent so much cash on acquisitions that went nowhere? Why save a few dollars on eliminating free aspirin when the company is shoving hundreds of millions of dollars on pie-in-the sky ventures like Pets.com? It's not like this wasn't overlooked. The author lavishly details both the thriftness and the overspending, but never attempts to reconcile the two. There are other examples like this in the latter chapters, which reads more like a litany of press releases rather than a compelling story with insight and analysis that made the earlier chapters so gripping. Thus the 4 stars.

Lastly, by the time you read this book, Amazon.com has grown into new directions beyond what the book portrays. It's a good overview of the startup phase, adequate beyond the IPO phase up to about the year 2000 to the beginnings of the NASDAQ meltdown, but not beyond it.

I don't know how to put it, was this book a never ending praise for Amazon.com or a non-biased account of what Amazon.com is about. I think i am more inclined towards the 'praise' part, why? Let me give one example, in the earlier part of the book, the author mentions that companies like Barns & Noble presented a big threat to Amazon.com, and from that point onwards he continues to portray B&N as the baddies. As if B&N were always bent upon destroying Amazon, and Jeff Bezos never once made a bad move, he never ever made one mistake. Come one admit it, if B&N is this big today, they must have done something right somewhere.
I wish that the author had taken the time to express his own thoughts somewhere in the 200+ pages.
This book would be a good read if you have literally no idea about Amazon.com, otherwise I would say, go out and look for a book which not only praises,criticezes but also expresses author's own opinions on the subject matter.
P.S. If you find something, please let me know too.