nervous senior executives finally convinced Bezos to shift gears. Instead of Get Big Fast, the company adopted a new operating mantra: Get Our House in Order. The watchwords were discipline, efficiency, and eliminating waste. The company had exploded from 1,500 employees in 1998 to 7,600 at the beginning of 2000, and now, even Bezos agreed, it needed to take a breath. The rollout of new product categories slowed, and Amazon shifted its infrastructure to technology based on the free operating system Linux.
