Quiz Of The Week: Amazon.com

In a remarkably short time Amazon.com has become a huge online retailer, as well as a giant in the cloud computing space.

Founded in a garage, the company started out with the idea of revolutionising how books are sold, and then rapidly expanded into other goods. It was when cloud computing took off, that it started to look really exciting.

A cloud giant emerges

Amazon’s first years were an exciting sequence of canny moves in which its understanding of online marketing enabled it to easily outmanoeuvre potential rivals who simply didn’t know what the Internet was all about. It rapidly began to sell other items including electronics and even groceries.

The company developed a virtualised IT infrastructure which allowed it to scale its capacity up and down as required – and then realised that this service was yet another thing it could sell online. The result was Amazon Web Services, a leader in cloud infrastructure services.

It’s also proven very skilled in financial tactics. With its European headquarters in Luxembourg, it has managed to almost completely avoid paying corporation tax in Britain according to recent criticism.

Meanwhile, its hardware has proven very popular – the Kindle is an established leader in e-readers, while the Kindle Fire Android tablet has gained market share through a low price point – designed to give Amazon more opportunity to sell digital content.

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