The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon Kindle Edition

As somebody who has been familiar with Amazon since they began (tech in Seattle is a small world), Amazon has always been in my peripherals so I was already somewhat familiar with Amazon's stigma, especially in this city, as well as what a lot of people have had to say about Amazon. This book only really scratches the surface of the mindset of Jeff and his executive team throughout the course of Amazon's history, but if you can take an objective viewpoint and read between the lines of the book you can get a pretty revealing idea of how Amazon operates and their philosophy behind a lot of what they do. There is a lot to get out of this book that other things are severely lacking (looking at you, New York Times).Like other people have mentioned, this book paints Jeff in a little bit of a strange light, only focusing on his ruthless approach to business and e-commerce and spending little time talking about the fact that he is indeed human and has a wide range of emotions and isn't actually Darth Vader incarnate.All in all, I enjoyed the book thoroughly. The pacing is quick, but not thin, and the author spends just enough time explaining situations to provide context without risking crafting a dense editorial. The language is smart, but not aloof, and the progression of the writing makes it easy to continue reading for long stretches of time unlike a lot of other books like this one.

I’ve been fascinated by Amazon and Jeff Bezos since I first heard about them in 1994-1995, and followed the company closely ever since, via articles, videos, and so on. When I helped launched Circuitcity.com in 1999, Amazon was one of the sites that I used for inspiration on a daily basis.I enjoyed reading this book; I learned a lot about Amazon’s history and culture. I always find the “backstories” interesting. Of course, I think you have to take any single article or book with a grain of salt; we humans tend to be subjective, myopic, and one-sided, even if our intentions are good. And, I don’t think the author actually interviewed Mr. Bezos, so that seems like a significant miss to me. But all in all, I don’t think the book comes across as either for or against Amazon, and it is a very easy read. If you’re trying to learn about Amazon, don’t limit yourself to this book, or any other single source of information. I’d particularly recommend reading the book's reviews written by Mackenzie Bezos and Andy Jassy.One really interesting tidbit was the story about Jeff having an open seat in meetings, where the “customer” is seated. Some people may think it a bit silly, but I don’t. I can’t think of a better constant reminder. I’ve found that I actually seem to have a lot of the same quirks and philosophies as Mr. Bezos, which is kind of cool. Like, frugality is one of my mantras too. It’s hard to find fault with much of anything, when Amazon has been so successful.

I was looking for a biography of Jeff Bezos and The Everything Store is about Amazon almost exclusively. The book reveals what a complex entity Amazon is and how tremendously impressive Jeff Bezos is, and that's useful but there may be a little too much detail, and I'd like something more on how Bezos' style has meshed with the presumably independent Washington Post. Also, I 've been wondering about the competition between Bezos and Musk in the area of space ships. Perhaps the book was written before much could be said about either of those two topics. It's interesting to know that Bezos, like Musk and Jobs, all very successful, were pretty rough on those who worked for them and don't seem to have suffered for it.

This is like an insider report on the rise of Amazon from its early history. I was hoping for a book that would look more at the impact that Amazon is having on society. Amazon is having a huge impact on our way of life, and it would be nice to have a book that really takes on some of these issues. This feels like a book written largely to tell the amazon story from the side of amazon. I suppose this an accepted genre by now: the business genius story. I would also add: Amazon is changing so quickly that even a book that is a few years old will not be relevant for long.

The story of Amazon and Jeff Bezos is to some extent the story of the Information Age and the digital economy. Well written, well researched and easy to read, you cannot help but come away with admiration for the accomplishment of Bezos and the Amazon team. Not just a puff piece, you will see the good, the bad and the ugly elements. A good piece of journalism and a very good read.

Excellent book. This is a quick read, I could not put it down. The book, through many interviews, really shows you how Amazon / Jeff Bezos is super determined to grow grow grow! The long term vision of Amazon is really inspiring, especially seen in light of how many companies these days make short sighted decisions to boost short term growth and stock prices, at the expense of the long term.This is a fascinating book showing how Amazon is disrupting business models, creating new business models, changing the world, re-writing the rules, you name it, it's here.While reading, and certainly after finishing the book, I simultaneously felt 2 feelings: awe, but also fear. If you can't beat 'em do you join 'em ?One huge takeaway from this book: to survive, or thrive, in business (or life) , you need to embrace change, or better yet, create the change yourself..because then you are in control and in the lead.Having the first mover advantage means if you hustle, you'll get, (and probably stay) in the lead, and the others will likely never catch up, barring first mover complacency or scandal/catastrophe.I highly recommend this book for anyone who wants to understand how the world is changing, how Amazon works, and how business is changing. Of course this book also demonstrates why bricks and mortar stores will have a difficult (though not impossible) time of surviving.

This has been on my kindle for ages, and I wish I read it before now. The book gives a fascinating insight into Amazon, not just the Amazon we know today but right back to the start of the business.The author, Brad Stone, is a well respected US journalist with a strong pedigree in this arena, and with The Everything Store he really delivers. The book appears well researched with lots of rich history, from the amusing to the serious technical details, and introduces the reader to a lot of the key players in the business.As a longtime Amazon user I thought I knew a lot about it, but it turns out that Amazon is like an iceberg and we only see a small percentage of the real company on the surface, the rest of the behemoth is under the surface, away from view.This book is very readable, Stone has turned what could have been a quite dry subject into a fascinating read that keeps you turning the page. Some books in this genre are heavy going, but this one has just enough story-telling weaved through the cold facts to keep you interested to the end.If you're interested in Amazon or the way that billion dollar businesses are built and run this will make for a great read which I highly recommend.

It stays faithful to consumers but is ruthless for everyone else. I liked one of the "jeffism's", (as the author likes to refer to some of his statements) Keep an empty chair in business meetings while taking business decisions. The empty chair signifies the customer and the decision makers should keep the customer in their minds.After reading the biography of ELON MUSK and now this, I can now safely say that, you need to be low on empathy if you want to run a bold and thriving business. (Correct me if I am wrong & recommend a contradictory biography )

This book, published in 2013, is both a history of Amazon as a company in its first nearly two decades and a biography of its remarkable founder, who has imprinted his philosophy probably more deeply than any other CEO of a major company, arguably even more so than Steve Jobs did with Apple. Indeed, the author, a technology journalist claims that: "In a way, the entire company is scaffolding built around his brain—an amplification machine meant to disseminate his ingenuity and drive across the greatest possible radius". The company is often stated to be based around certain key concepts: putting the interests of the customer at the centre of everything it does, especially in terms of low prices and excellent customer service, and ahead of the interests of employees and the potential threat from competitors; a capacity for reinventing the rules of retail, as the most successful company whose rise coincided with that of the internet in the mid to late 1990s, surviving the dot com crash; and a determination to take a long term view of the company's prospects, eschewing immediately profitable lines for long term future growth areas across an ever great wider range of goods: witness, Amazon Fresh. This is powered by a virtuous cycle, or flywheel, described thus: "Lower prices led to more customer visits. More customers increased the volume of sales and attracted more commission-paying third-party sellers to the site. That allowed Amazon to get more out of fixed costs like the fulfillment centers and the servers needed to run the website. This greater efficiency then enabled it to lower prices further. Feed any part of this flywheel, they reasoned, and it should accelerate the loop".Clearly in all the above, Amazon has been massively successful. Yet it has faced criticism over tax and some of its employee policies, and as Brad Stone, and many past employees point out, Amazon has no culture of work-life balance and different teams working together: Bezos appears to believe that creative tension creates progress and drives up standards. There is a powerful feeling across the political divide in the US that Amazon has got too big and is exercising a distorting effect on many markets (though some of this is caused by political jealousy, for example Trump's dislike of the liberal Washington Post newspaper, also owned by Bezos). Brad Stone is apparently writing an updated version of this book, which should be an interesting read. Certainly, barring some unforeseen catastrophe, Amazon's capacity for forward-looking thinking and not resting on its laurels seems set to ensure it continues to evolve and play a key role in online retail for many years to come.

Grab an armful of business leadership books from your nearest bookshop and look through them for advice on how to treat staff. I doubt you'll find any of them encouraging business leaders to humiliate their colleagues in public more frequently.Yet one of the most memorable stories in Brad Stone's account of how Jeff Bezos made such a success of Amazon is just such an encounter with a senior manager. They were giving answers that Bezos did not believe about the speed with which the phones were being answered by the customer service team. So in the middle of a meeting with senior managers, Bezos put a phone on loudspeaker, dialed Amazon's customer service number and started ostentatiously timing how long it took to be answered. He'd been told that calls were being answered in less than a minute, but the meeting had to sit in excruciating silence as the minutes ticked up before finally the phone was answered.A devastatingly effective way of making a point, true. But how do you combine such a brutish attitude at times with an ability to recruit, retain and motivate the sort of brilliant staff you need, especially when Amazon wasn't paying high wages? The mystery is deepened by the grimly humorous collection of stories of other technology CEOs and their abrasive behaviour that Brad Stone presents in the book.As with Steve Jobs, reading about Jeff Bezos and all his quirks in dealing with other human beings (not to mention Amazon's huge sums spent on failed takeovers) leaves you wondering for much of the time if you're reading an account of a brilliant success or a tragic failure. Clearly the path Amazon has taken shows he - like Jobs - is the former.But whilst Walter Isaacson's biography of Jobs does answer the question of how Jobs and Apple ended up so successful despite his manner, in the case of Bezos and Amazon, Brad Stone leaves that question only partly answered. Early on in the book Amazon is but one amongst many online book selling startups. Stone explains well why traditional bookselling firms found it difficult to move into the online business, constrained as they were by their heavy investment in offline stores. Why, though, did Amazon triumph from all those different online startups? That Stone doesn't tell us.The more successful Amazon gets, the better Stone's book does explain its gathering momentum, especially thanks to Bezos's insistence on using Amazon's scale to drive prices as low as possible. There are two types of company, Bezos says. Those that looks to charge as high a price as possible (think Apple) and those that look to charge as low a price as possible (think Amazon). Amazon's low prices may have kept its profits down, but they have hugely boosted its size and, while Apple's high margins have attracted big competitors eating into its market, Amazon's low margins have kept competitors out of the market, leaving more space for it to grow even further.It's a shame though that the initial crucial breakthrough remains unexplained even by the end of an enjoyable book.

I thought this was an even-handed, well researched history of Amazon. There's a lot to admire about the company, but Jeff Bezos's very heavy-handed approach to suppliers and employees is disturbing, not to mention the extraordinary lengths he has gone to in attempts to avoid paying the taxes which most other businesses pay.There is no doubt that Amazon is a wonderful company from the consumer's point of view. However it has used its immense power in the marketplace to reduce what creative individuals, small companies and employees can earn for their hard work.This book does not have much information on what it is like to work in an Amazon warehouse. This topic has been covered extensively and its absence makes the book incomplete. As a society, we need to question whether it is right for any company to treat employees badly, and to do so we need good information about the reality of the workplace.Jeff Bezos was adopted by his stepfather, and until fairly recently he did not have any contact with his biological father. The author of this book decided to track down his biological father, who did not know that the son he fathered grew up to be Jeff Bezos, and to reveal this information to him. I consider the author's interference in the Bezos family relationships to be unethical. Journalists are meant to report a story, not alter the story to make their book more 'interesting'.