Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
pand. Some of these, such as Amazon, are still successful today, but many did not
make it past the dot-com bubble burst of 2000.
As with the other chapters, there were many additional companies created be-
sides the ones shown here. For example, at least a dozen game companies were
created. However, game companies tend to have their own culture and seldom
commission studies of quality or productivity, so very little data, other than reven-
ues, are available.
Some of the companies with unusual or interesting business models created
during the 1990s are discussed here.
Akamai
Akamai was founded in 1998 in Cambridge, Massachusetts, by MIT graduate stu-
dent Daniel Lewin and MIT professor Tom Leighton. (On a sad note, Lewin was
one of the passengers on American Airlines Flight 11 and was killed during the
September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.)
This is an interesting niche company. It speeds up web browsing by mirroring
sites and web content on very fast servers. There are a lot of servers, and one of
the Akamai value-added features is a set of mathematical algorithms for optimiz-
ing traffic. (The two founders were both mathematicians.) Akamai has more than
100,000 servers in 78 countries. Although Akamai provides services to users, their
clients are major corporations that want to provide fast and secure content to their
customers.
Amazon
Amazon was founded in Seattle, Washington, in 1994 by entrepreneur Jeff Bezos.
It went public in 1996. Amazon is currently the world's largest online retail store.
This company, like Apple, was formed in the garage of the founder. The name is
derived from the Amazon River and was selected because Jeff Bezos wanted the
company to have “A” as the first initial so that it would appear toward the front of
catalogs and phone books.
Amazon started as a bookstore, and it obviously competed with thousands of
brick-and-mortar stores all over the country. The advantage that Amazon provided
was that it offered more content than local stores. Costs were low because there
was no physical warehouse. There were no sales taxes either, but that advantage is
under fierce attack by numerous state governments.
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