Introduction
Amazon.com Inc. is unquestionably the largest e-commerce retailer in the world today; yet, what made Amazon.com Inc. transcend from a “good” business that sold books online to the “great” business that it is today? To begin we must understand that which determines if a business is “good” or “great”. In his book Good to great: Why some companies make the leap and others don’t author Jim Collins defines greatness in terms of a business as the ability of a company to average cumulative stock returns of 6.9 times the general market in the fifteen years following the company’s transition from below the general market to above (Collins, 2001). Collins goes on to say, “Good-to-great companies think differently about the role of technology. They never use technology as the primary means of igniting transformation; yet, paradoxically, they are pioneers in the application of carefully …show more content…
launched the Kindle, a device that offered a comfortable reading experience, wireless connectivity, and access to Amazon’s inventory of books. Amazon’s well established business selling printed books online gave it ready access to a large set of book buyers, and the company promoted the Kindle, and e-books aggressively (Gilbert, 2015). Essentially, Amazon discovered a niche in its domain and instead of starting anew utilized its previous resource of book titles and relationships with publishers to create the foundation of a new market while still being competitive in traditional book retail. This is known as an analyzer strategy according to Miles and Snow’s strategy of typology (Daft, 2013). In the first quarter of 2012, Amazon was still by far the leading e-book retailer with 70 percent of e-book sales with competitors Barnes & Noble accounting for 20 percent and Apple accounting for 10 percent. The creation of this new market and properly managing the technology has allowed Amazon to reap the benefits and excel into greatness in the terms of Jim
Amazon.com Inc. is unquestionably the largest e-commerce retailer in the world today; yet, what made Amazon.com Inc. transcend from a “good” business that sold books online to the “great” business that it is today? To begin we must understand that which determines if a business is “good” or “great”. In his book Good to great: Why some companies make the leap and others don’t author Jim Collins defines greatness in terms of a business as the ability of a company to average cumulative stock returns of 6.9 times the general market in the fifteen years following the company’s transition from below the general market to above (Collins, 2001). Collins goes on to say, “Good-to-great companies think differently about the role of technology. They never use technology as the primary means of igniting transformation; yet, paradoxically, they are pioneers in the application of carefully …show more content…
launched the Kindle, a device that offered a comfortable reading experience, wireless connectivity, and access to Amazon’s inventory of books. Amazon’s well established business selling printed books online gave it ready access to a large set of book buyers, and the company promoted the Kindle, and e-books aggressively (Gilbert, 2015). Essentially, Amazon discovered a niche in its domain and instead of starting anew utilized its previous resource of book titles and relationships with publishers to create the foundation of a new market while still being competitive in traditional book retail. This is known as an analyzer strategy according to Miles and Snow’s strategy of typology (Daft, 2013). In the first quarter of 2012, Amazon was still by far the leading e-book retailer with 70 percent of e-book sales with competitors Barnes & Noble accounting for 20 percent and Apple accounting for 10 percent. The creation of this new market and properly managing the technology has allowed Amazon to reap the benefits and excel into greatness in the terms of Jim