Everyone who started an Internet-related business in 1994 was driven by the dream of becoming big. Amazon is one of the few that has really succeeded.
Amazon is one of the Big Four, the four most dominant companies in the online economy (the other three are Google, Facebook and Apple). So dominant that they are regularly summoned for questioning in the US Congress, where they just as regularly deny that they are abusing their control over the substantial part of the global public they own.
The highlights of Amazon's impressive - and worrying - success story are:
The store for everything: From the start as a bookstore, Amazon has grown to include everything that can be bought: all types of goods in all versions, well-known brands, small upstarts, Amazon's own original products and budget copies of other bestsellers. Amazon is the world's largest e-commerce site and is estimated to account for half of all e-commerce in the United States. In addition, Amazon is the world's largest seller of cloud services to other companies.
The store as a search engine: Amazon sells goods, and lets others sell in their marketplace. The fact that small producers get a chance to reach the world's largest marketplace is usually emphasized as one of the company's good effects. But the site's search function and start pages determine how easy it is for a product to meet a buyer. This provides inexhaustible opportunities to sell various types of benefits like marketing. Amazon is also constantly accused of favoring its own products in the algorithms - and of developing its own products based on user information that can be extracted from the search engine.
The store as a mass medium: At home in the USA, Amazon has a book publisher and a large online magazine for book lovers. Kindle which is one of the dominant e-book readers is Amazon. The company is also one of the world players in streaming film and TV, also on the production side with Amazon Studios. The premium service Amazon Prime not only provides extra fast home delivery of physical goods, but also membership in a wide range of streamed media services in both video and audio formats.
The store that pushes costs and people: "Your margin is my opportunity" - is Amazon leader Jeff Bezo's famous, bloodthirsty battle cry. So the profit margin other traders need to survive is the battle zone where Amazon can crack the traditional trade - by doing everything at a lower cost, but on a much larger scale. This means that all remuneration - including to publishers, authors and other copyright holders - is reduced. And that the personnel needed in the highly automated warehouses are exposed to a brutal time pressure that often leads to conflict. Expect that Swedish unions are on the alert before the opening of the Amazon warehouse in Eskilstuna.