Blog Post

Flashback to 1997

Earlier today, Amazon CTO Werner Vogels tweeted out an interesting look into Amazon’s past.

Now, there are lessons to learn from that letter and I don’t want to overshadow that, but there’s one line of nostalgia I just can’t get over.

Among the measures by which Amazon had improved in 1997, the following was listed:

We established long-term relationships with many important strategic partners, including America Online, Yahoo!, Excite, Netscape, GeoCities, AltaVista, @Home, and Prodigy.

That’s a lot of names of things that used to be huge, most of which no longer even exist.  I’ve got a soft spot for GeoCities, specifically, as the site that is now DetroitHockey.Net lived there for quite awhile and saw a ton of growth.

As I said, though, there are lessons to learn.  All of those companies were Amazon’s “long-term … important strategic partners.”  And Amazon outlasted nearly all of them (only Yahoo retains any kind of influence, though AOL limps along).

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