The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon

by Brad Stone

The publisher showed Bezos Amarank, a sophisticated tool his company had created that visited the Amazon website every few hours and copied the rankings of O’Reilly Media books and the books of its competitors. It was a clunky process that relied on a primitive technique called screen scraping, and O’Reilly suggested that Amazon should develop a series of online tools called application programming interfaces, or APIs, that allowed third parties to easily harvest data about its prices, products, and sales rankings. O’Reilly spoke ambitiously about parceling out entire sectors of the Amazon store and allowing other websites to build on top of them. “Companies need to think not just what they can get for themselves from new technologies but how they can enable others,” he said.8 After O’Reilly’s visit, Bezos convened a meeting with Rick Dalzell, Neil Roseman, and Colin Bryar, the head of Associates at the time, to talk about the issue. Dalzell pointed out that there was already something like this under way inside the company and told Bezos about a young engineer named Rob Frederick whose mobile commerce startup, Convergence, Amazon had acquired in 1999. Frederick’s group was working on APIs that would allow non-PC mobile devices like phones and PalmPilots to access the Amazon store. After that meeting, Bezos invited O’Reilly to speak to a group of engineers, and later at an Amazon all-hands meeting, about lessons from computer history and the importance of becoming a platfo...