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sector. Nor so little time that he could not immerse himself fully in the
sector and short-list 20 possible product areas before selecting books.

That’s why the story of Amazon.com makes essential reading.

Amazon.com – shaping the internet
opportunity40

the success of this iconic internet-based retailer highlights

the benefits of investing time in assessing and shaping the opportunity,
and thereby translating fuzzy possibility into big vision reality.

This fuzzy opportunity brought about by technology was recognised in
early 1994 independently by two men, a Briton and an American, who
were both in their early thirties. The Briton, Darryl Mattocks, was a
computer games specialist whose wife worked in publishing. Jeff Bezos
was a Wall Street whizzkid who had graduated summa cum laude from
Princeton University in computer science and electrical engineering. He
had risen swiftly to become the youngest ever senior vice-president in
the history of D. E. Shaw investment bank.

Chance reading led Bezos in 1994 to the statistic that internet usage
was growing by 2,300 per cent per year. ‘Anything that is growing that
fast is going to be ubiquitous very quickly. It was my wake-up call,’
recalled Bezos.

Cushioned by the financial rewards of his brief yet successful Wall
Street career, Bezos left his job in order to immerse himself fully in
seizing and shaping the opportunity which intuition told him that the
internet represented. At this stage, the opportunity was just ‘fuzzy’.
Bezos’ first step was to deepen his understanding of the opportunity by
systematically researching the key factors required to build a successful
internet business, a research exercise which The Economist later
applauded as a ‘model of financial rigour’.

Bezos also invested time in thoroughly investigating the full range of
product categories which might meet those critical success factors. He
generated a list of around 20 potential markets, including videos,
computer hardware, computer software, clothing, books and music. By
interrogating the options, he narrowed down the alternatives to two –
music and books – on the grounds that these two markets presented a
characteristic which offered a significant competitive advantage for