From source to mighty flow

By The Data Team

IN THE summer of 1994 Jeff Bezos quit his job on Wall Street, and made for Seattle. With his wife at the wheel of their hired car, he sketched out a plan to set up an online catalogue retailing business. About a year later, the first book was sold by Amazon, a name Mr Bezos chose to reflect the giant scale of his ambitions for the company. The world saw a website selling books and assumed that the firm was, and always would be, an online bookshop. Mr Bezos, though, had bigger plans.

Today Amazon celebrates its website’s 20th birthday. In the last two decades it has changed how people shop—and much else. In the 1990s typing your credit-card number into a browser seemed insane; Amazon proved otherwise, sparking what is now a $1.5 trillion global e-commerce market. The Kindle, launched in 2007, popularised e-books, with low prices and instant delivery to the device. Less obviously, Amazon pioneered customer reviews and ratings, first of books and then other things. Professional critics were appalled; today everything from hotels to electrical appliances carry online ratings. And by renting out server capacity by the hour, Amazon catalysed cloud computing and powered internet startups from Netflix to Airbnb. Apple may have popularised digital music players, smartphones and tablets, but Amazon has arguably done just as much to shape the digital world.