Bit of a boring Saturday, so I thought this could be an interesting discussion. The shareholders letter from 1997 here, send me a message if this goes down, though it's under 100 kb so I should have enough bandwidth.
Looking back on it there are a few interesting things. The first is how many times Bezos strongly emphasizes long term. It's said in one form or another throughout the entire letter. The most amusing is a subtle jab at Wall Street about how they only care about the short term; Bezos acting like a bit of a heavy weight even in the companies infancy.
The next is customer satisfaction. I think this still holds true today; no doubt nearly all of us have experienced it when we needed to return something and Amazon either created a return shipping label or told us to keep the item and refunded us, and this has happened even on very expensive > $100 items.
Another was about the company making bold decisions. And we still see this up until recently and some of those decisions will leave many shareholders scratching their heads, ie the recent Whole Foods acquisition.
Now where I am a critical is the letter also mentions how they are focusing on how easy it is to shop online. This may have been true two decades ago, but I think Amazon's search engine for finding things has got much worse as they have added so many products.
Overall nice to see a company not waiver in its original goals.
Submitted November 04, 2017 at 01:24PM by directheated http://ift.tt/2hETGxG
