Amazon.com, the company that that demonstrated the Web could be safe for commerce, marks two anniversaries this month — the 20th anniversary of its incorporation and the 19th anniversary of the opening of its online store.
The occasions represent opportunities to ruminate about how far the company has traveled from its modest and mythical origins. And how controversy once was so seldom attached to Amazon.
Almost no one noticed when Amazon — incorporated in July 1994 as Cadabra Inc. — started selling books at its Web site on July 16, 1995. As I note in my forthcoming book about that decisive year, the obscurity of its origins “seems in hindsight a bit astonishing, given how embedded Amazon has become in American life and culture.”
It is, tech writer Amy-Mae Elliott once wrote, “as much of a landmark on the web as the Eiffel Tower is to Paris.”
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