Bezonomics: How Amazon Is Changing Our Lives and What the World's Best Companies Are Learning from It - Softcover

Dumaine, Brian

 
9781982113643: Bezonomics: How Amazon Is Changing Our Lives and What the World's Best Companies Are Learning from It
Softcover
ISBN 10: 1982113642 ISBN 13: 9781982113643
Verlag: Scribner, 2021

Inhaltsangabe

An “illuminating, lucid, and finely detailed” (The Washington Post) look at Amazon’s world-dominating business model, the current competitors either imitating or trying to outfox Amazon, and “how Jeff Bezos turned Amazon into the world’s lockdown necessity” (The Times, UK)—from an award-winning Fortune magazine writer.

Like Henry Ford, Sam Walton, or Steve Jobs in the early years of Ford, Walmart, and Apple, Jeff Bezos is the business story of the decade. Bezos, the richest man on the planet, has built one of the most efficient wealth-creation machines in history with more than 2% of US household income being spent on nearly 500 million products shipped from warehouses in seventeen countries. Amazon’s business model has not only turned the retail industry and cloud computing inside out, but now its tentacles are squeezing media and advertising, and disrupting the state of technology, the economy, job creation, and society at large. Amazon’s impact is so pervasive that business leaders in nearly every sector around the world need to understand how this force of nature operates.

Based on unprecedented behind-the-scenes reporting from 150 sources inside and outside of Amazon, Bezonomics unveils the underlying principles Jeff Bezos uses to achieve his dominance—customer obsession, extreme innovation, and long-term management, all supported by artificial intelligence—and shows how these are being borrowed and replicated by companies across the United States, in China, and elsewhere. Including tips for Amazon-proofing your business, Bezonomics answers the fundamental question: How are Amazon and its imitators affecting the way we live, and what can we learn from them?

A goldmine for some, and a threat for others, “Bezonomics” has proven to be a life-shaping force in our lives both now and in the foreseeable future.

Die Inhaltsangabe kann sich auf eine andere Ausgabe dieses Titels beziehen.

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Brian Dumaine is an award-winning journalist and a contributing editor at Fortune magazine. In addition to Bezonomics, his works include The Plot to Save the Planet, and, with three coauthors, Go Long: Why Long-Term Thinking Is Your Best Short-Term Strategy. He and his wife live in New York.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

Chapter 1: Bezonomics CHAPTER 1 Bezonomics
As she wakes in the morning, Ella asks Alexa to brew her coffee, check the weather, and order groceries from Whole Foods to be delivered to her apartment that evening. Ella is twenty-six years old and has hardly known a world without Amazon. She bought all her college textbooks used from the website, then sold them back. Although she’s had an Amazon Prime subscription since she was eighteen years old, she still feels an endorphin surge when she comes home to find a package on her doorstep sealed with Amazon-branded packing tape.

After breakfast, Ella takes the subway to her office. For her work, she searches for Bluetooth keyboards; no surprise, Amazon has the best selection. She clicks twice and knows they’ll be at her desk the next or maybe even the same day if she really needs them fast. She backs up important company files on the cloud built by Amazon Web Services, researches small-business loans offered by Amazon Lending, then gathers her team to discuss her start-up’s next major milestone: launching a new product on the Amazon site. That evening, on her way home, she stops at a cashier-less Amazon Go store to pick up a snack, and when she leaves, sensors and cameras automatically charge her Amazon account for what she carries out. She returns home, where she asks Alexa to read her a recipe for dinner. After eating, she relaxes by asking Alexa to play the Amazon Prime Video hit The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel on her TV, and then falls to sleep reading her Kindle.

Ella is a fictional character, but the world she lives in is very real. We all know that many others like her exist in the Amazon ecosystem—Amazon Prime members in America pay $119 a year for the privilege of being fully enmeshed in it. Millions of Amazon’s products can be shipped to them in seventeen countries in two days or less for free. Not all Amazon shoppers, however, are Prime members. Around the globe, an estimated 200 million additional online shoppers have, whether they realize it or not, signed on for Bezos’s operating system for life. And Bezos has only started to penetrate world markets. The company is extending its tentacles through Europe, India, Africa, South America, and Japan. Only in China, with its formidable homegrown digital giants Alibaba and Tencent, has Amazon been thwarted.

To the person on the street, Amazon is a business that delivers lots of stuff in little brown boxes. Walk down an avenue on any given afternoon in L.A., London, or Mumbai and you’ll see Amazon’s smile boxes piled up in lobbies or dropped at doorsteps. A former Amazon executive who served for a decade in high-profile positions at the company told me that what Amazon is really doing is creating a new operating system that will be broader and more pervasive than Apple’s iOS or Google’s Android. “Everything we did at Amazon,” he said, “was about becoming a tightly woven part of the fabric of [people’s] lives. We did that on Amazon.com and now here comes the Amazon Echo with Alexa, who tells us the weather, plays music for us, controls the lights and cooling in our houses and, yes, helps us buy things on Amazon.com. We’re getting to the point where there is going to be a massive integration. Amazon is becoming an operating system for your life.”

It’s hard to fathom just how popular and addictive and all-encompassing Amazon has become. During the 2017 holiday season, three-quarters of Americans who shop online said they would make most of their purchases on Amazon. The next closest destination was Walmart.com, with 8 percent saying they’d do most of their shopping there. U.S. Post Office trucks in suburban areas made extra runs to deliver the stream of Amazon packages. In some areas, mailmen started their routes at 4:00 a.m. to keep up with the volume. On New York’s Fire Island, the local ferry each morning was taking so long to unload Amazon deliveries that some ferry riders had to take an earlier boat to avoid missing their commuter train to New York City.

In an age where people are losing trust in our institutions, Amazon has earned deep respect. In 2018, the Baker Center at Georgetown University asked Americans which institutions they believed in the most. Democrats picked Amazon above all others—quite surprising, given the mounting attacks from the Left targeting the company’s tough warehouse working conditions and its ability to squeeze large tax breaks from local governments and the fact that it paid little or no federal income tax in 2017 and 2018. The Republicans polled picked Amazon third after—no shocker—the military and the local police. Whether Democrat or Republican, those surveyed respected Amazon more than the FBI, universities, Congress, the press, the courts, and religion. That perhaps helps explain that while 51 percent of American households attend church, 52 percent have Amazon Prime memberships.

The reverence for Amazon runs particularly deep among the millennials and Gen Zers. The Max Borges Agency polled 1,108 people from the ages of eighteen to thirty-four who’d bought tech products on Amazon in the last year. An astounding 44 percent said they’d rather give up sex than quit Amazon for a year, and 77 percent would choose Amazon over alcohol for a year. This, however, might reveal as much about the lifestyles and sex drives of millennials and Gen Zers as about Amazon’s allure.

That kind of stellar reputation among consumers translates into dollar signs. A ranking of the world’s most valuable brands, released in mid-2019 by the data firm Kantar, a division of the advertising giant WPP, put Amazon for the first time at the top of the list. Its brand, Kantar estimates, is worth $315 billion—up by an impressive $108 billion from the previous year. Amazon beat out Apple and Google for the top spot. The company outpaced both Alibaba and Tencent by more than a two-to-one margin.

Amazon has become so addictive that it’s now taking a significant share of Americans’ income. The company siphons off 2.1 percent of all household spending—or some $1,320 for a U.S. family that earns $63,000 a year. The main reason consumers open their wallets for Amazon is that it saves shoppers the time, hassle, and expense of driving or taking public transport to a store to purchase mundane items such as diapers or batteries. A case in point: when Charlotte Mayerson, a retired book editor living on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, needed new batteries for her old landline phone, she hopped a bus to the nearest Best Buy for a replacement. The helpful clerk said: “Best Buy does not carry that battery, but I’d be happy to help you out.” He walked to his computer screen and ordered the woman her replacement batteries—on Amazon.

Even some shoppers who despise Amazon can’t live without it. Nona Willis Aronowitz, in an op-ed for the New York Times, said that on principle she hated Amazon because of the reports she’d read about the way it treated its warehouse workers. Yet, after her eighty-five-year-old father, who’d been a labor activist at one point in his career, had suffered a debilitating stroke, Aronowitz came to depend on Amazon for making sure her house-ridden dad had everything he needed—from physical therapy balls to cheap tubs of protein powder. Aronowitz saw using Amazon as a...

„Über diesen Titel“ kann sich auf eine andere Ausgabe dieses Titels beziehen.

Verlag
Scribner
Erscheinungsdatum
2021
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
1982113642
ISBN 13 
9781982113643
Einband
Taschenbuch
Anzahl der Seiten
352
Kontakt zum Hersteller
preigu GmbH & Co. KG
mail@preigu.de

Lengericher Landstr. 19
Osnabrück
Niedersachsen
49078
Deutschland

Weitere beliebte Ausgaben desselben Titels

9781982113636: Bezonomics: How Amazon Is Changing Our Lives and What the World's Best Companies Are Learning from It

Vorgestellte Ausgabe

ISBN 10:  1982113634 ISBN 13:  9781982113636
Verlag: Scribner, 2020
Hardcover