Amazon (company)

The Amazon Spheres, part of the Amazon HQ campus in Seattle

**Amazon.com, Inc.**, doing business as **Amazon**, is a multinational technology company focusing in e-commerce, cloud computing, and artificial intelligence in Seattle, Washington. It is one of the Big Four or "Four Horsemen" of technology along with Google, Apple and Facebook due to its market capitalization, disruptive innovation, brand equity and hyper-competitive application process.

Amazon is the most valuable public company in the world ahead of Apple and Alphabet. It is the largest e-commerce marketplace and cloud computing platform in the world as measured by revenue and market capitalization. Amazon.com was founded by Jeff Bezos on July 5, 1994, and started as an online bookstore but later diversified to sell video downloads/streaming, MP3 downloads/streaming, audiobook downloads/streaming, software, video games, electronics, apparel, furniture, food, toys, and jewelry. The company also owns a publishing arm, Amazon Publishing, a film and television studio, Amazon Studios, produces consumer electronics lines including Kindle e-readers, Fire tablets, Fire TV, and Echo devices, and is the world's largest provider of cloud infrastructure services (IaaS and PaaS) through its AWS subsidiary. Amazon has separate retail websites for some countries and also offers international shipping of some of its products to certain other countries.

Amazon is the largest Internet company by revenue in the world. In 2015, Amazon surpassed Walmart as the most valuable retailer in the United States by market capitalization. In 2017, Amazon acquired Whole Foods Market for $13.4 billion, which vastly increased Amazon's presence as a brick-and-mortar retailer. The acquisition was interpreted by some as a direct attempt to challenge Walmart's traditional retail stores.

## History

*Main articles: History of Amazon and Timeline of Amazon.com*
In 1994, Bezos incorporated Amazon. In May 1997, the organization went public. The company began selling music and videos in 1998, at which time it began operations internationally by acquiring online sellers of books in United Kingdom and Germany. The following year, the organization also sold video games, consumer electronics, home-improvement items, software, games and toys in addition to other items.

In 2002, the corporation started Amazon Web Services (AWS), which provided data on Web site popularity, Internet traffic patterns and other statistics for marketers and developers. In 2006, the organization grew its AWS portfolio with Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), which rents computer processing power as well as Simple Storage Service (S3), that rents data storage via the Internet, was made available. That same year, the company started *Fulfillment by Amazon* which managed the inventory of individuals and small companies selling their belongings through the company internet site. In 2012, Amazon bought Kiva Systems to automate its inventory-management business, purchasing Whole Foods Market supermarket chain five years later in 2017.

## Board of directors

As of May 2018, the board of directors is:

* Jeff Bezos, President, CEO, and Chairman
* Tom Alberg, Managing partner, Madrona Venture Group
* John Seely Brown, Visiting Scholar and Advisor to the Provost at University of Southern California
* Jamie Gorelick, partner, Wilmer Cutler Pickering Hale, and Dorr
* Daniel P. Huttenlocher, Dean and Vice Provost, Cornell University
* Judy McGrath, former CEO, MTV Networks
* Jon Rubinstein, former Chairman, and CEO, Palm, Inc.
* Thomas O. Ryder, former Chairman, and CEO, Reader's Digest Association
* Patty Stonesifer, President, and CEO, Martha's Table
* Wendell P. Weeks, Chairman, President, and CEO, Corning Inc.