e-shipping

All the retailers are trying to become e-tailers so that Amazon doesn’t take all their business from them. They have a very long way to go to get with the program. Amazon has been honing their web presence for 16 years and they have it down to a science — and to putting the customer first. Seems everything they do makes sense. Amazon Prime, for example, is fantastic. Some of the things aspiring e-tailers do make no sense. My wife ordered a pair of gloves for one of our daughters-in-law. The unbreakable product arrived in a box that could have contained a suitcase or a television. The unbreakable unscratchable gloves were surrounded by enough packing material to handle a few table settings worth of dishes. Go figure.

Tags: amazon, e-tailers, online retail, prime shipping

The Great Pay Wall of Slovakia

The first time I visited Slovakia, it was part of the former Communist nation. At the border crossing there were soldiers with machine guns. They rifled through our luggage and put a large mirror under the car to see if were attempting to bring something bad into the country. The country joined the European Union in 2004 and today, according to Business Week,  it is considered to be a high-income advanced economy with one of the fastest growth rates in the European Union A Bloomberg Businessweek story a few days ago described how a Bratislava company is organizing a national pay wall and has signed up the country’s top publications (See Online Media: The Great Pay Wall of Slovakia – BusinessWeek). This seems like a really good idea to me. U.S. publishers should pay attention. I am not suggesting a national paywall, by any means. But how about a business publications paywall, or maybe one for news, or for sports? The publsihers are fighting with Apple, Amazon, and others trying to preserve their models of the past. (I was really pleased to see Netflix stand up to Starz and not cave to the old model). The Slovakia model has subscribers paying roughly $4 per month (or $40 per year) to gain access to nine different publications. Publishers want us to pay $5 per copy for each of their magazines. Not going to happen. How about $5 per month for access to Businessweek, Forbes, Fortune, Wall Street Journal, Barrons, Smart Money, and the Harvard Business Review? I think millions would go for it. Nobody will read all the content of all these publications. Some will read all of one of them, others will read a little of each. The publishers will have to face the music at some point (no pun intended) or they will be disintermediated completely. I pay for WSJ and BW because I read them both cover to cover, but I won’t pay for the New York Times. I read the key stories they publish through the NYT blogs. The NYT gets no money from me. However, if there was a news paywall and for $5 per month I could have access to all the major news sources I would consider it. The NYT would get a slice of the $5 based on how many pageviews they got out of the total for the paywall offering. Another way for the NYT to get money from me would be for them to include their business section as part of the business publication paywall. The Slovakians are onto a really good approach. It takes cooperation from competing entities but I don’t see anything other than greed standing in the way. A tech company in Bratislava called Piano set up the infrastructure and promised nine publishers that they would not have to make any capital investment. Piano’s chief executive officer said it took a year of meetings to persuade the nine publications to get on board. Piano takes a 30% commission and the 70% gets split among the nine publishers proportionate to readership. I don’t know how they handled mobile devices, but clearly they should be included as part of the offering. Publishers, network operators, and platform providers including Apple et al want a share of the pie. Whatever they can work out is fine but from a consumer point of view, I think most of us would agree that what we want is simple. Pay once and read anytime, anywhere, on anything for an affordable fee for substantial content.

Tags: bratislava, media, paywall, publishers, slovakia

In The Clouds (Part 4)

The August issue of PC Magazine began the “magazine’s” 30th year and I have not missed an issue, although this is the first one I read on the iPad with Zinio. If someone had described the iPad to me back in 1981 it would have seemed like science fiction. Even the PC at that time seemed an amazing breakthrough. The first PC had a 5.25 inch diskette drive and no hard drive. Anybody have their archives on 5.25 inch diskettes?I hope not because it might be hard to find a drive to read them.

The First Word column by Lance Ulanoff over at PC Mag this month was called Storage Evolution in which Lance discusses how storage has evolved from one type of media to another. When a new size or type of storage is introduced it always seems that the new paradigm will last forever. In the grand scheme of things the evolution looks more like pings on a radar screen. They come and they go.  Sony has just made a decision to end production of the 3.5 inch disks. When the CD became popular for backing up our files it seemed to be the ultimate. Then came the DVD and then double sided and double depth. External drives, zip drives, USB keys, tape cartridges, and perhaps holographic storage soon. Getting the latest and greatest to backup your data is the easy part. What about five years from now when you want to restore some data from your archived storage? Will you have a PC or Mac that has a device that can read the storage medium you had chosen five years prior? Maybe and maybe not.

Why not let someone else worry about all this? There is something about clouds that brings the term into our daily lives. We say “it is a cloudy day”, or “there is not a cloud in the sky”, or if we feel especially elated or happy we might say “I feel like I am on cloud nine“.  More and more people are answering the question of where is there backed up data with “it’s in the cloud”. Some people worry about whether it will be safe and secure in the cloud but from my perspective it is important to compare the risk to that of keeping such data on your own computer. In fact I would say that the risk of your data getting compromised at a cloud backup service is less than the risk of your hard drive crashing or having your laptop stolen at Laguardia Airport, or at some point of being unable to read the data because the storage medium is incompatable with your computer.

Cloud services companies have a lot more at stake than we do when it comes to maintaining high integrity for their operations. They will keep your backup data backed up and they will use whatever the most cost-effective storage media is. As new kinds of media come along they will adopt it and migrate all your data to it. Their problem, not yours. The argument for using them is compelling from my point of view. There are many companies that offer backup services including Mozy, Carbonite, and SOS. See PC Magazine for a review. I have been using idrive.com for quite some time and have found it very reliable. The services can be setup to automaticaly make backups while you are sleeping. You can have the backups run daily, weekly, or even continuously so that whenever a file changes on your computer a backup is made in the cloud. The best part is that you don’t have to buy any devices and worry about how compatible they may be in the future.

Is cloud computing for businesses or for consumers? It is for people. Businesses do not buy from businesses. People in businesses buy from people in businesses. People work at businesses and people work at home. Some people are students and some are e-tired. Clouds are all about making people more productive and increasingly the clouds will be where we will keep all of our data that feel is important.

Other patrickWeb stories that refer to “clouds”

Tags: backup, backup service, cloud, cloud computing, cloud services, diskette, dvd, holographic, ipad, media, pc magazine, storage, storage medium, tape, usb

iPhone 4 – Part 1: The Order

The order process for the iPhone 4 put together by Apple and AT&T rates a 1 out of 10 at best. A lot of promotion went into the “pre-order” process to encourage us all to place our orders on June 15.  Like many, I started out at 6 AM with the best of loyal intentions. Thirteen hours later after many attempts I was finally able to get the order registered at the Apple Store and now look forward to the June 24th delivery.

When it comes to design, software integration, ease of use, and dominance of music and app distribution, Apple is king of the hill. When it comes to offering cloud services, such as MobileMe, and a scaleable server environment for huge onslaughts of order activity, Apple seems to fall down consistently.This is not a good sign moving forward. A poorly executed once a year first day order process may not harm the Apple market dominance but there are things on the horizon that will critical every day of every year for most every Apple customer. (See excellent story “Why Aren’t I the Center of the Apple Universe?” by Matt Buchanan).

The central role of iTunes has to evolve to the Cloud. To require a new iPad or iPhone 4 user to have to plug in cables and connect their new Apple device to a PC or Mac in order to get music and apps onto the device is starting to look and feel a bit old-fashioned. Why can’t the music and apps synchronize “over the air” like the Google contacts, calendar, and gmail emails do? It is clear that this is where things are headed and the question is whether Apple is ready.

There are several challenges to make a Cloud services vision possible. First is an iTunes redesign that permits Cloud services for iPads, iPod Touches, and iPhones but which also permits the local attachment of devices such as iPod Nanos and Shuffles which do not have their own communications capabilities. Secondly is whether there is sufficient bandwidth at the user end, at AT&T (and other carriers) and at Apple to enable all the music and apps to traverse over the air. Finally is the question of whether Apple can create a Cloud services infrastructure that is sufficiently robust to provide the services that will be needed. Their capabilities to handle the order inflow of the new iPhone 4 suggests that Apple has a long way to go in this last dimension.

Could be that AT&T is part of the order entry problem. The failures in the process did seem to me to occur when I got to the step where eligibility had to be checked with the carrier. AT&T has a particularly bad web site. Talk about confusing. You can’t tell if you are at att.com, att.net, att.uverse.com, uverse.com, at a section for consumer, small business, enterprise, or whitepages.com. The big picture is clear that the mobile Internet is evolving rapidly. No longer is the Internet where our PC is — the Internet is where we are. Apple is pushing the envelope into this new space. AT&T is dragging along their legacy. As consumers and employees of businesses we will gain trememdously from this new found mobility afforded by the Internet.

Tags: apple, at&t, carrier, cloud, ipad, iPhone, iphone4, ipod, itunes

Amazon Wireless

Amazon is one of the few web sites that really and totally has their act together. In the Fall of 1995, I made a
presentation in Atlanta to a group of CEOs about the Internet. I showed them various web sites that I was fascinated with at the time, mostly related to engineering, scientific, government and academic projects. The word e-business had not yet been coined by IBM and there were not many exciting business web sites. One that seemed quite novel though was a small site called Amazon.com. I asked for a show of hands from those who had heard of Amazon. Not a single hand went up.

Amazon opened its virtual doors in July 1995 with a mission to “use the Internet to transform book buying into the fastest, easiest, and most enjoyable shopping experience possible” . During the next few years Amazon became very popular and it was hailed as not only the best web site, but also as the new model of how businesses of all kinds would operate. The stock climbed from obscurity to a market capitalization of nearly $50 billion. When the Internet bubble burst that value went down tremendously and skeptics said it would never get to that level again. It finished today at $55 billion.

Amazon customer service is second to none. In all these years I have never once heard of a disgruntled customer. The company continues to innovate. The Kindle has been a joy. Many of us have talked about wrap rage when it comes to packaging. Amazon is actually doing something about it. Fortunately, Jeff Bezos has small children and has experienced the impossibility of opening toys so he has pressured manufacturers to stop their bad packaging habits and has introduced Amazon Frustration-Free Packaging.

Some years ago I enabled an Amazon Store page here on patrickWeb and writing this story motivated me to spruce it up a bit. Feel free to try it out and please give me any feedback you want. If someone buys from the patrickWeb store, a small commission is generated from Amazon. Over the years it has amounted to roughly $25 per year and more than all of it goes to charity. Not likely I will be a threat to local retailers. I just like the idea of providing a link to an e-business that I think does a really great job for customers.

The newest Amazon innovation is their introduction of AmazonWireless – a new website by Amazon specializing in cell phones and wireless service plans and offering more than 140 bestselling phones from AT&T, T-Mobile and Verizon Wireless. As only Amazon can do they will offer truly easy shopping without rebate hassles, and free two-day shipping. They will also make it easy for customers to upgrade their phone if they already have a plan, or if they want to establish new cell phone service, has tried to make it simple to find the right phone, service plan, and options. (Compared to the ineptitude of the carriers this should be easy). With all the familiar Amazon features like bestseller lists, detailed product descriptions, and customer reviews, I have no doubt this new part of Amazon will be a big success.

Tags: amazon, cell phone, Mobile, phones, wireless

In The Clouds (Part 3)

There is something about clouds that brings the term into our daily lives. We say “it is a cloudy day”, or “there is not a cloud in the sky”, or if we feel especially elated or happy we might say “I feel like I am on cloud nine“.  Nowadays many are talking about “cloud computing“. Sometimes we just say something is “in the cloud”. It means different things to different people.

In the early days of the Internet we thought of it as made up of three parts. First there was a discrete collection of specialized computers called routers which moved packets of ones and zeroes between origin and destination. Secondly was another set of computers called servers which contained emails and web pages, and finally the networking infrastructure including telephone wires, modems, and various networking devices such as hubs and switches that tied everything together. Users of the Internet today that are not aware of this technical history — which is the vast majority of the world’s billion + users — know the Internet for its most popular application, the World Wide Web. In a sense, the web is a “place” that contains all of the information and applications that we want to use.
In more recent years the larger web application providers, such as Amazon, eBay, Google, Yahoo!, and others have begun to refer to their infrastructure as “clouds”. If you create a spreadsheet at Google Docs and then save it, where is it actually saved? In the Google “cloud”. We don’t know where it really is — it is just “there” at docs.google.com — in the “cloud”. There are many millions of servers on the Internet but to most people there may as well just be one. That is the beauty of the Internet — you don’t have to know what the infrastructure is or how it works. But suppose the spreadsheet you create and save at Google Docs happens to be your personal financial plan with income, taxes, assets, liabilities and estate plans. Do you trust Google with this information? There are multiple dimensions to the question and answers. From my perspective it is important to compare the risk to that of keeping such data on your own computer. In short, I would say that the risk of your data getting compromised at Google is less than the risk of your hard drive crashing or having your laptop stolen at Laguardia Airport.

Consumer and enterprise interest in cloud computing is on the rise. As security and reliability guarantees of public cloud service providers improve, more businesses are turning to the cloud not only to optimize their own IT infrastructure and workloads but to improve efficiencies in their business models by better integrating employees with clients and suppliers. In January IBM announced the largest enterprise cloud computing deployment in history at Panasonic Corporation. The consumer electronics giant  has begun a migration to IBM’s LotusLive public cloud services. More than 100,000 employees in various departments will participate initially and then expand to more than 300,000 employees and external partners and suppliers.

The Panasonic users will work together across the Web as efficiently as if they were all down the hall. The company believes that the freedom and cost-efficiencies of the cloud are compelling and that the IBM cloud will provide the security, reliability and privacy they require. The users will get web conferencing, file sharing, instant messaging, project management and social networking for business communications between employees, partners and suppliers. Panasonic has made a strategic decision to unify its brands worldwide under the Panasonic name and the IBM cloud solution will allow the global effort to provide a competitive advantage by helping its multiple business units work together more efficiently.

Is cloud computing for businesses or for consumers? It is for people. Businesses do not buy from businesses. People in businesses buy from people in businesses. Clouds are all about making people more productive. Panasonic appears to be adopting this philosophy in a major way and setting a very good example which will surely be emulated.

Solar

Alternative energy — sources that have no undesired consequences unlike fossil fuels or nuclear energy — are renewable and are often thought of as “free”. There are billions of dollars being spent on alternative energy but there clearly are benefits compared to conventional energy sources. The alternative sources include biomass, wind, solar, geothermal, hydroelectric the tides and other things. There is controversy over how much of the world’s total energy needs can be met by the collective output of alternative energy sources but I had thought there was general agreement that even if it is 10% or even less that it was a good thing. I had written a storyabout wind turbines and much to my surprise there was a lot of pushback about whether it was a good thing at all. 

 Other energy related stories on patrickWeb

Credit Cards

There are approximately 1,500,000,000 credit cards in the United States — an average of five cards for every man, woman, and child. I have always thought it would be great to have just one. If I could have just one it would be the American Express platinum card. The fee is quite high but my experience has been that it pays for itself. Disputes all get resolved. They make you satisfied no matter what it takes. A couple of years ago I reserved five rooms at a hotel for some colleagues and I who were planning to attend a convention in Atlanta. A month before the event I cancelled four of the five rooms due to a change of plans. The hotel refused to give credit for the rooms even though I had emails to prove the cancellations. It is a long story but the bottom line is that American Express gave credit for the rooms. That one incident will pay for a couple of years of the annual fee. I have no doubt that any other credit card would have said tough luck. The card also gives free admission to the airline club lounges.

Speaking of other credit cards, it is unfortunately not possible to have just an American Express card. Many small retailers and restaurants will not accept American Express. It is too bad that they often insult the card holder with comments like "we take anything but" the card you presented. I have resigned to the fact that I need to carry two cards. One easy solution is to have a debit card but credit cards offer two advantages. You get free money — float — for 30+ days as long as you pay your balance. Secondly, you get points, miles, or cash rebates. It was my experience that the miles and points are too restrictive to be valuable. I concluded the best deal in the long run is to get the cash rebate which averages out to 1.5% of your purchases. In the summer of 2005 I found the ideal card — an ExxonMobil Mastercard — issued and managed by Citigroup. The ExxonMobil card offered a 1% cash rebate on all purchases and 3% on their gasoline purchases for six months and then 2% (and now 15 cents per gallon). One of the prerequisites in selecting this card was that it work directly with Quicken — which I have been using since 1984 (Quicken 1.0 for DOS). Each time I update Quicken it automatically goes to Citicards (and American Express) and downloads all new transactions.

I have been a loyal user of the ExxonMobil card for almost four years. I pay my balance on time and they are usually helpful in the event of an issue with a merchant — although much more difficult (write us a letter) than American Express (call and get instant temporary credit while the issue is resolved). A few weeks ago I discovered that my Mastercard transactions were not downloading. The error message delivered from Citicards via Quicken was "Your financial institution has rejected your request". No big deal. I have run into this error before. It will be fine tomorrow I thought. But it wasn’t. It still does not work. Technical support at Citicards said the problem was that they do not yet support Quicken 2009. Quicken 2009 hit the market last summer and that did not seem like the right answer because it had been working. Looking around the support forum at Quicken I discovered that a lot of people were having the same problem. The card holders were very clear in their frustration but Citi was not listening. I sent tech support an email and to my delight they answered it the next day — the email contained 89 words to give me a link to a web page with their answer which only had 63 words. Here is what they said.

We appreciate your inquiry and regret any inconvenience. The ability to download transactions via Quicken previously was a website error that has since been corrected. The ability is no longer available as Exxon Mobil has not authorized Quicken use of the website. At this time no plans for restoration of the service has been identified or released. Thank you for using our website.

In other words the fact that it worked was a bug and the fix is to not allow it to work. I can ignore their "purchase APR equals the Prime Rate plus 14.99% (with a minimum of 21.00% and a maximum 28.99%" because I pay my balance on time, but I can not ignore the fact that Citicards has decided to not allow their gasoline cards to work with Quicken. It really makes you wonder how such a huge organization could be so clueless and send an email that violates common sense. Their own bank and their own credit cards of course do allow Quicken downloads. This huge financial services company has a way of making you feel irrelevant. The only solution is to cancel the card. Now they have 92 million minus one card holders. The online application for a Capital One No Hassle Cash Rebate Mastercard took a few minutes and resulted in an approval within a few seconds. (I first verified with Quicken that the card transactions can be downloaded). The lesson for all businesses is that their customers are only a mouse click away from their competitors.

In The Clouds (Part 2)

There is something about clouds that brings the term into our daily lives. We say “it is a cloudy day”, or “there is not a cloud in the sky”, or if we feel especially elated or happy we might say “I feel like I am on cloud nine“.  Nowadays many are talking about “cloud computing“. Sometimes we just say something is “in the cloud”. It means different things to different people. The goal of this story is to share what cloud computing means to me, personally. In a way it is simple, but in a way it is profound.

In the early days of the Internet we thought of it as made up of three parts. First there was a discrete collection of specialized computers called routers which moved packets of ones and zeroes between origin and destination. Secondly was another set of computers called servers which contained emails and web pages, and finally the networking infrastructure including telephone wires, modems, and various networking devices such as hubs and switches that loosely tied everything together. Users of the Internet today that are not aware of this technical history — which is the vast majority of the world’s billion + users — know the Internet for it’s most popular application, the World Wide Web. In a sense, the web is a “place” that contains all of the information and applications that we want to use.

In more recent years the larger web application providers, such as Amazon, eBay, Google, Yahoo!, and others have begun to refer to their infrastructure as “clouds”. If you create a spreadsheet at Google Docs and then save it, where is it actually saved? In the Google “cloud”. We don’t know where it really is — it is just “there” at http://docs.google.com — in the “cloud”. There are many millions of servers on the Internet but to most people there may as well just be one. That is the beauty of the Internet — you don’t have to know what the infrastructure is or how it works. But suppose the spreadsheet you create and save at Google Docs happens to be your personal financial plan with income, taxes, assets, liabilities and estate plans. Do you trust Google with this information? There are multiple dimensions to the question and answers. From my perspective it is important to compare the risk to that of keeping such data on your own computer.

I have been using IBM ThinkPads since 1992. They are very reliable — but they do break. Hard drives are mechanical devices that fail; not often but they fail. How many people keep their data backed up? The minority. Does Google keep your data backed up? I completely trust them on this and have no doubt that their commitment and execution on backup is better than mine. The Google File System is very sophisticated and distributed. I don’t know where my data is exactly but I know it is not at Google Headquarters in Mountain View, California. In fact I am sure it is  replicated around the world and combined on the fly as needed. From a security perspective there are some risks but Google does support document transfer using encryption and I suspect their security will get better and better over time. I suspect they have excellent programs to protect against employee intrusion and disaster recovery.According to Safeware Insurance Agency in Columbus, Ohio, more than 600,000 laptops are stolen or lost every year. I doubt if Google’s computers will be lost or stolen.

I was skeptical about using Google’s gmail in the beginning because I was hooked on the Outlook client. Not that I really liked Outlook but it has the look and feel of the desktop. Generally speaking Outlook performs well and you can work on things without waiting for the network. Gmail on the other hand is an online web application. The surprise to me has been how fast gmail performs — especially when using the Google Chrome browser which executes the program instructions which are stored in the gmail webpage at lightning speed. At this point I would say not only does it perform as well as a desktop application but is actually faster for most of the things I tend to do — like looking for something in my archive of more than 30,000 emails. What about when I am not connected to the Internet? There actually are ways to work offline but in reality, and considering the great gmail support in the iPhone, I am almost always connected. When it comes to email, I have moved to a cloud. My email is still john@patrickweb.com but my server forwards everything to my gmail account which where I access it.

Cloud computing has been around for years, we just didn’t call it that. What has changed is that it has become easy. If I add an appointment or a contact to my iPhone, a few seconds later it is accessible at me.com/calendar or me.com/contacts. Likewise if I make a change at me.com, the change is reflected a few seconds later on my iPhone. Lotus Notes and Microsoft Exchange have had this synchronization capability for many years but it was Apple that has made it really simple. So simple, that they explain it simply by saying that your data is in the MobileMe cloud.

Spreadsheets, presentations, text documents, email, contacts, calendar — all in the clouds. What is not in the cloud? There still remain, for the moment, some applications that cling to the Windows or Mac desktop. The biggest example is Quicken. It is a large and complex application with intense graphics and sophisticated interaction. Can it be done with javascript in the browser.  like gmail? I have no doubt, but not so far. Quicken.com and mint.com and others are going after it but at this stage they have not been able to replicate what Quicken does on the desktop. There are other examples, such as Adobe Dreamweaver and other sophisticated tools, but ultimately everything that most of us need will be in the clouds. 

Will everything be in the Google cloud? They make a compelling case, but I don’t think so. There was a time when pundits said that IBM was taking over the world. Later the pundits said Microsoft was taking over the world. Now some say it will be Google. The world is a big place. There are billions of people out there and large numbers of clouds they will utilize. In fact more and more clouds are being formed. Startup companies these days do not bother with the details of their Internet infrastructure. Many of them use the Amazon cloud. The Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (aka Amazon EC2) is a web service that provides “resizable” compute capacity in the cloud. For storage, many companies use the Amazon Simple Storage Service (aka Amazon S3) to enable storage in the cloud. The advent of cloud computing has made it possible for startup companies to get from new business idea to a full implementation of their idea in weeks instead of months.

Great for smaller companies but what about the really big companies like GE, Goldman Sachs, Walmart, Bank of America, BP, or Toyota? How about when they have a new web-based idea? How do they deploy it? Generally speaking it takes a lot of detailed planning. The project manager has to specify exactly what resource is needed — a very specific computing capacity and well defined storage. In many cases it is difficult to be precise when an idea is new. They could use Google or Amazon but chances are they would prefer to have their own cloud. The large companies of the world have vast computing resources and skills and they also have a desire to keep things inside their own tent for various security and intellectual property reasons. Enter IBM and their new plans for “Blue Cloud“.

“Blue Cloud” is a series of cloud computing offerings that will allow corporate data centers to operate more like the Internet startup companies by enabling computing across a distributed, globally accessible fabric of resources, rather than today’s predominantly local machines or remote server farms. Blue Cloud technology will make it possible to have the computing resource and storage be specified in “virtual” terms and the cloud will do the provisioning in an automated manner using virtual resources. Underneath the cloud there are real resources but the cloud computing environment manages them in an autonomic way. That means that the cloud responds somewhat like the human body. When we get cold we shiver to warm up. When we get hot we sweat to cool down. In a similar fashion, the Blue Cloud will automatically add computing resources and storage on demand and when something breaks the cloud will provide alternate paths to keep things running. The project is based on open standards and open source software supported by IBM’s hardware, software, and services businesses.

Blue Cloud will not replace the computing infrastructure of the world’s enterprises any time soon but over time, this new approach to IT should dramatically reduce the complexity and costs of managing Internet projects. Ultimately, most computing may be done in the clouds and billions of people will be interacting with data and applications with handheld devices that will be more powerful than the supercomputers of just a few years ago.

Amazon Does It Right

Amazon is one of the few web sites that really has their act together. In the Fall of 1995, I made a presentation to a group of CEOs about the Internet. I showed them various web sites that I was fascinated with at the time, mostly related to engineering, scientific, government and academic projects. The word e-business had not yet been coined by IBM and there were not many exciting business web sites. One that seemed quite novel though was a site called Amazon.com. I asked for a show of hands from those who had heard of Amazon. Not a single hand went up.

Amazon opened its virtual doors in July 1995 with a mission to “use the Internet to transform book buying into the fastest, easiest, and most enjoyable shopping experience possible”. During the next few years Amazon became very popular and it was hailed as not only the best web site, but also as the new model of how businesses of all kinds would operate. The stock climbed from obscurity to a market capitalization of nearly $50 billion. (See other stories about Amazon in patrickWeb)

Amazon customer service is second to none. In more than a dozen years I have never once heard of a disgruntled customer. The company continues to innovate. The Kindle has been a joy. Many of us have talked about “wrap rage” when it comes to packaging. Amazon is actually doing something about it. Fortunately, Jeff Bezos has small children and has experienced the impossibility of opening toys so he has pressured manufacturers to stop their bad packaging habits and has introduced Amazon Frustration-Free Packaging.

Some years ago I enabled an Amazon Store page here on patrickWeb. If someone buys via a link from the site a small commission is generated. It amounts to less than $50 per year and more than all of it goes to charity. I just like the idea of providing a link to a retailer that I think does a really great job for customers. Forecasters are saying that online sales are not going to be so great this year. Could be, but I would not be surprised to see Amazon beat expectations. They are starting the shopping season aggressively with their Black Friday Sale.