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introduction
In the traditional impression, Amazon is an online bookstore.At the same time, it is an e-commerce company.Now it has become a high-tech company that collects data and intelligence.
The company's name originated from a river-the Amazon River. The Amazon River is the world's largest river. The amount of water flowing into the sea accounts for 1/5 of the world, and it contains more than 15,000 tributaries. The characteristics of Amazon are also the same, users The volume is in the hundreds of millions, and the business modules are contending. In 2019, Amazon's annual turnover was 280.511 billion U.S. dollars, which is equivalent to 2.5 Huawei. And a Huawei's turnover is more than Baidu, Ali and Tencent combined. Amazon is A veritable digital business empire, Bezos, as the founder and CEO, has been the world's richest man many times. Now Amazon has long become a legend in the IT industry, and many emerging companies regard it as a sought-after object.
Past and Present
Amazon's business types are very rich, with a complete structure. Each segment of the business has a strong competitive advantage and market leading ability in the market. At present, the main business modules are as follows:
- Online self-operated store, analogy to Jingdong
- Offline self-operated stores
- E-commerce platform, analogy to Taobao
- AWS cloud industry (detailed follow-up)
- Amazon Prime is a fee-based membership system similar to VIP. Users spend a small amount of money to buy annual memberships, and then they can enjoy discounts and privileges when buying and using Amazon products.
Amazon's other sub-streams are even more numerous, such as the e-reader Kindle, which is well-known to the public, and the humble advertising business that generates $13 billion in revenue each year. Such a huge volume cannot be achieved overnight. , Bezos, as the CEO, his original idea was to create a universal bookstore.
Amazon was originally a mail-order bookstore. The user checked the book with a pen on the card, and then sent it to Amazon. After Amazon received it, it integrated all the data to find the publisher to print and distribute, and then mailed the book to the user. 1995 Internet It has already emerged, but Amazon did not perceive the role of the Internet. In the end, users really couldn't bear the original operation method, and they put forward opinions and wanted to change it into online webpages to facilitate users to choose books. One of Amazon's core capabilities is willing to listen to customers and talk. Demonstrate strong execution.
In 1995, Amazon officially entered the Internet and developed a web-based online bookstore. Many large bookstores have built their own online bookstores when they saw Amazon's actions. They are far away from the type of books and the number of inventory. Better than Amazon, the huge survival problem lies in front of us at this moment.
Looking for hope in a desperate situation, when there is no way out, a way out. Under the condition that funds, capabilities and resources are not dominant, Amazon has found a secret need in users, and thus found a vitality for themselves. Users buy every copy. Books, in fact, want to get useful knowledge from books. Before buying a book, he doesn't know whether the book is meaningful to him. He needs to consult those who have read it, and spend time and money to buy it. Is it worth it after the book? These hidden needs have been seen by Amazon, so the ecology built around books has grown rapidly. Each book has become a community between readers and readers, and even between readers and authors. Links, open up to each other to share their feelings after reading, the formation of the book ecology has attracted users. In addition, sometimes one book is not enough to solve a problem, and users need to learn multiple sets of related books to truly apply. This is Amazon I saw it again. Book buying websites can't just be a channel for book circulation, it can also provide a complete set of knowledge solutions, and it becomes a product recommendation when it reaches the product level. A user has purchased a book that has a similar theme or a system that is similar to this type of book. Books appear in the recommended list. Many times users will express feelings that the recommended books are more suitable for their needs than the books they want to buy. To make the recommendations accurate, the back-end service has to start storing large amounts of data and optimizing the recommendation algorithm. This laid the foundation for the future development of Internet business.
When the Internet bubble burst in 2000, Amazon was also hit hard by the economy. How to complete the original idea of becoming a universal bookstore when it was unable to raise funds to obtain funds. This seemed to be an insurmountable gap. Amazon had to face it. Regarding the problems before us, how can we realize our initial dreams without the improvement of funds and performance? Life does not kill the will to move forward. A great company can always find ways to deal with the crisis when faced with difficulties. For a turnaround. In order to realize the vision of becoming a universal bookstore, Amazon has created a new business model. Its online store is no longer just a part of a commodity circulation channel, but has transformed into a store that can be sold by all merchants. In the case of serious shortage of funds, Amazon invited merchants to settle in by building an online platform, which not only realized the idea of a universal bookstore at a low cost, but also opened a new path for itself, and the e-commerce platform came into being. It has also become the originator of the e-commerce field.
The emergence of the platform has brought countless business opportunities for Amazon, but the solution of a problem often brings new problems. A large number of merchants have entered Amazon and provided countless users for the platform. Order transactions have swept through like bamboo shoots after a rain shower. The end server, how to ensure that the back-end IT services can support such a huge amount of visits and peak-hour transactions. In order to solve this imminent problem, Amazon has invested a huge cost to build a large number of IT service facilities, just for users to be able to go smoothly and smoothly online Shopping. But where does the budget for these IT facilities come from? If you increase the unit price of the product to make users pay, it will not only drive users into the arms of competitors, but also make users lose confidence in Amazon.
What is innovation? Innovation is a bridge across the impossible river. In 2016, the birth of AWS became that bridge. AWS is Amazon Web Services, also known as Amazon Cloud, and is currently the world's largest cloud industry provider. In many At that time, a large number of IT service resources are idle during off-peak hours, and no value is created. In addition, hardware storage and maintenance require additional expenses. These IT services can be sold to users who are unable to build or purchase, they only need You can rent it for a small fee, so a potentially huge market opens up. According to relevant statistics, Amazon Cloud accounts for 51.8% of the global cloud business market share, Microsoft Azure Cloud accounts for 13.4%, and Alibaba Cloud accounts for 4.6%. Today, AWS brings 60% of Amazon's profits every year. Unexpectedly, a compelling and even somewhat overwhelming choice at the beginning has now become Amazon's mainstay.
Later, more and more businesses split and multiplied, and Amazon became the largest river in the Internet world.
Is life only superfluous?
Amazon seems to have come all the way just to satisfy the immediate ambivalence, take one step, look one step, and then take another step. Every leap forward seems to be forced to livelihood. Many people will voice doubts. Amazon is a company that only knows to bury your head. A company that doesn't look up at the road by a car. If you ask it where it is, it seems to respond to the road. Is it really a company that only focuses on short-term benefits and lives in the present, as everyone says?
Looking back at Amazon’s development history, from the initial mail-order bookstore to the later online bookstore, from the initial paper book to the later e-reader kindle, from the initial e-commerce platform to the offline physical store. Every action is full. The transformation of the direction, from e-commerce to the software field is already a huge risk, and then cross-border to hardware research and development, such as the well-known kindle and smart speaker echo. The most interesting thing is that Bezos also opened a Rocket Launch Company can be compared with Musk's Space X. This series of cross-border operations has long gone beyond mainstream business common sense, and the key is to finally hand in a satisfactory answer.
What drives him all the way forward and keep expanding the territory? This company is born with a special prismatic thinking, and can discover and refine the true wishes of customers in time. It is not so much that he is running forward, it is better to say it is. Users need him to run forward. Amazon often promotes the concept of obsessive users. Obsession means watching users for a long time, not only to understand their main needs and pain points, but also to understand the pain points they are suffering but cannot be expressed in words. , And understand their growing needs and the pain points brought about by those new needs. Problem solving only constitutes a one-time accident, and the philosophy of obsessing users tells a long-term development story line. From the surface, Amazon is busy. Running in the current life, this seems to be a company without a long-term strategy. But in fact, the state of obsessed with users will magnify the needs of many ordinary people that are difficult to see and deeply rooted in customers. At the same time, these needs continue to progress with the progress of the times. Growth, user needs have been driving Amazon to the distance, and customers continue to lead Amazon to subvert itself.
Looking back on the past, Amazon’s entire growth process showed a spontaneous and spontaneous character, but it does not mean that there is no strategy. In fact, Amazon pursues an evolutionary strategy rather than a planned strategy recognized by mainstream views. This is a bit like nature. Choice, when nature creates species, there is no blueprint in hand. The harsh living environment has come to the world, natural selection of materials, and survival of the fittest. Today's species have undergone tens of thousands of years of evolution, and no one can predict that the environment will change. No one can predict what a species should evolve into, but in the end only species that adapt to the environment can survive. Amazon obsessively pays attention to users, continuously salvaging and digging, to obtain the obvious or unobvious needs of users. How deep is the need to understand, then how far the performance of the product can go. It is precisely because Amazon is good at seeing needs that are difficult for others to discover, coupled with the inherent risky genes, many of them are unfamiliar or even cross-border. The business started from this. Facing the nature of business society, Amazon relied on its keen sense of smell to continuously launch products to be tested, and market feedback pushed the products to a new round of upgrades and iterations, until they finally conquered consumers. heart.
Bold risks have also come with a heavy price. Amazon has seen 18 major failures in its 26-year development process, resulting in billions of dollars in economic losses. However, it is necessary for Bezos to forcefully debug errors, but it must be Within a controllable range. Therefore, in many cases, Amazon has become a pioneer in many fields, as if it has entered no man’s land. There are no competitors, no natural enemies, and the entire sky is allowed to soar. Until 2017, cloud services were recognized by the public. When one of the most promising core industries in the future develops, Amazon has been on this path for 10 years. Can you say that it is a company with no long-term strategic vision? Amazon’s mission statement: “Become the most customer-oriented company on the planet” Central company". Only when the demand is seen deeper, the product can go further.
Amazon has always allowed itself to escape from the comfort zone and continue to enter new areas to broaden its business lines. Many companies understand that only by continuing to be true to themselves can the company grow. However, it cannot be carried out in actual implementation because there is no complete order process. When it was formed, all the rhetoric was just empty talk. Amazon understands this very well. Change will inevitably bring pain, but only change can survive. It establishes a set of constraints through the company's rules and regulations to implement and implement the corporate philosophy. For example, the Day one philosophy promoted by Amazon internally, the Day one philosophy is to return to the state of the first day of work. Amazon controls the proportion of indirect employees under a strict mechanism is the practice of the Day one philosophy. Go back to the first day, to face the customer, to solve the problem.