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Company to start widely shipping its voice assistant and Bluetooth loudspeaker, the Echo, starting next week
American retail giant Amazon.com turned 20 on July 6. In these 20 years, it has grown from an online bookstore to a multi-utility e-tail giant, and a pioneer in e-book readers.
Here are five of the most important milestones in its journey so far.
The start-up
Jeff Bezos (above), who founded the company in 1994, decided he would sell books online, to milk the large world-wide demand for literature, low price points for books, and the huge number of titles available in print. Bezos had thought of naming his business Cadabra.com, but went on to register the site as Amazon.com.
E-tail expansion
Bezos had chosen books as his diving board from a list of several promising e-marketing products, including compact discs, computer hardware, computer software and videos. In the long run Amazon would go on to include all of these and more to its product line-up.
The company currently sells everything from apparel, baby products, grocery add health & personal-care items, to musical instruments, sporting goods and even toys.
The diversification of its products came partly through acquisitions and partly via forays. Amazon Fresh and vine are prominent instances in the latter category.
Acquisition binge
Within four years of its start, Amazon was acquiring major internet domains, such as the Internet Movie Database (IMDb) and PlanetAll. In the years to come, it would go on to acquire a vast range of e-commerce sites, e-book developers and music and movie databases, such as the Chinese e-commerce site Joyo.com (2004); e-book software developers Mobipocket.com ( 2005), and Bookfinder.com (2008); rival e-book readers Stanza (2009), Woot (2010), Goodreads (2013); and Double Helix games and comiXology (both 2014).
Digital diversification
While Amazon had been enabling customers to donate and buy digital content with its Honor system since 2001, it launched its first major digital content store in the form of Amazon Music in September 2007, selling downloads exclusively in the MP3 format without digital rights management.
This was also the year of Kindle and the Amazon’s e-book library. By 2010, Amazon was claiming that its e-books sold more than hardcover books. In the subsequent years, it would go on to release the Amazon Appstore (2011) available for Android, and the Amazon Autorip (2013).
Readers and speakers
Amazon’s range of consumer electronics is of course headed by its e-book reader Kindle. The Amazon Kindle enables users to shop for, download, browse, and read e-books, newspapers, magazines, and (more recently) play games and watch movies.
The new kid on the block, however, is Amazon’s coming voice assistant and Bluetooth loudspeaker, the Echo. While the device had been available to select Amazon users on an invitation-only basis since last November, the e-tail major would ship it widely starting next week. Built to respond to voice commands, it can answer fact-based questions, play music and podcasts, and even stream albums from services like Spotify and Pandora.
