Amazon and its Great Failure: Books Prevail
Amazon wanted to dominate the book industry. It did. But now, smaller bookstores are thriving, and e-reading market seems like it is a niche. Kindle could have been something, but now it is a has -been. On Tuesday, July 5, 1994, Jeff Bezos, a scrawny 30-year old electrical and computer engineer from New Mexico (via Houston, Miami, Princeton and Wall Street) filed with the State of Washington a terrible name called Cadabra, Inc. If you read it out loud, it sounds like Cadaver, which is precisely what a lawyer misheard a few months later. Bezos then changed the name to Amazon.com, Inc. The company started out of Bezos' garage in Bellevue, Washington. In 1994, Bezos wanted to name his online store Relentless.com , a site that still redirects to Amazon--a domain name that is a testament to Bezos' ambition and Amazon's dominance. Bezos started his journey in Amazon as wanting to be the biggest bookstore in the world. What started with Douglas Hofstader's Fluid Concept...