Jeff Bezos's 1997 Letter to Amazon.com Shareholders

jonburs · on April 16, 2011

How the world has changed:

"We established long-term relationships with many important strategic partners, including America Online, Yahoo!, Excite, Netscape, GeoCities, AltaVista, @Home, and Prodigy"

zaidf · on April 16, 2011

For all the heat yahoo gets, they are still doing reasonably well. There aren't that many billion dollar dot coms that survived the crash and moreover provided some real value.

salemh · on April 18, 2011

As well as a very solid engineering department, despite the other structures surrounding the department.

angstrom · on April 16, 2011

If that's not a reminder of fleeting importance.

TillE · on April 16, 2011

And the consequences of failing to evolve.

Netscape made a mess of its browser, and GeoCities could have conceivably become a social / blogging / personal site platform that we'd be hailing as the next big thing.

burgerbrain · on April 16, 2011

"GeoCities could have conceivably become a social / blogging / personal site platform that we'd be hailing as the next big thing."

And the Canadians could have won the space race.

I mean, in some possible alternative reality both could have happened, but the number of changes there would need to be is staggering. Geocities, as it existed in this reality, was always doomed to failure and ridicule.

js2 · on April 16, 2011

And his 1994 ad seeking Unix developers: http://groups.google.com/group/mi.jobs/msg/d81b6c1fa8f361fc