Amazon.com, Inc. (also /ˈæməzən/ AM-ə-zən) is an American multinational technology company focusing on e-commerce, cloud computing, online advertising, digital streaming, and artificial intelligence. It is considered one of the Big Five American technology companies, alongside Alphabet (parent company of Google), Apple, Meta (parent company of Facebook) and Microsoft.
As the top dog in the all-important world of cloud computing, few companies are better positioned than AWS to provide AI services and machine learning to a massive customer base. In true AWS fashion, its profusion of new tools is endless and intensely focused on making AI accessible to enterprise buyers. AWS’s long list of AI services includes quality control, machine learning, chatbots, automated speech recognition, and online fraud detection.
Amazon was founded by Jeff Bezos from his garage in Bellevue, Washington, on July 5, 1994. Initially an online marketplace for books, it has expanded into a multitude of product categories, a strategy that has earned it the moniker The Everything Store. It has multiple subsidiaries including Amazon Web Services (cloud computing), Zoox (autonomous vehicles), Kuiper Systems (satellite Internet), and Amazon Lab126 (computer hardware R&D). Its other subsidiaries include Ring, Twitch, IMDb, and Whole Foods Market. Its acquisition of Whole Foods in August 2017 for US$13.4 billion substantially increased its footprint as a physical retailer.
Amazon has earned a reputation as a disruptor of well-established industries through technological innovation and “aggressive” reinvestment of profits into capital expenditures. As of 2023, it is the world’s largest online retailer and marketplace, smart speaker provider, cloud computing service through AWS, live-streaming service through Twitch, and Internet company as measured by revenue and market share. In 2021, it surpassed Walmart as the world’s largest retailer outside of China, driven in large part by its paid subscription plan, Amazon Prime, which has close to 200 million subscribers worldwide. It is the second-largest private employer in the United States.
As of October 2023 Amazon is the 12th most visited website in the world with 82% of its primary domains traffic coming from the United States.
Amazon also distributes a variety of downloadable and streaming content through its Amazon Prime Video, MGM+, Amazon Music, Twitch, and Audible units. It publishes books through its publishing arm, Amazon Publishing, film and television content through Amazon MGM Studios, including the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer studio which acquired in March 2022. It also produces consumer electronics—most notably, Kindle e-readers, Echo devices, Fire tablets, and Fire TVs.
Amazon has been criticized for customer data collection practices, a toxic work culture, censorship,tax avoidance, and anti-competitive behavior.
“Amazon.com Inc. is an American multinational conglomerate founded by Jeff Bezos in 1994 in Washington, United States, as an online platform for books. However, it has diversified its portfolio over the years and is today one of the US’s Big 5 information tech giants. The company is primarily involved in e-commerce activities, along with cloud computing services. Through its e-commerce platform, the company offers over 12 million products.
In 2005, Amazon launched a subscription-based over-the-top (OTT) platform called Amazon Prime, with subscribers in as many as 22 countries. In 2014, the company launched a virtual assistant technology called Amazon Alexa, an in-built feature of its smart home products, including Amazon Echo and Amazon Dot.
The company further strengthened its positioning in the media and entertainment space with the launch of Amazon Fire TV, which provides digital audio and video content and video games through the internet to a connected HD television. The company is currently the parent company to nearly 40 subsidiaries. Some of its biggest acquisitions include Zappos (2009), Quidsi (2010), Twitch (2014), Whole Foods (2017), Ring (2018), Zoox (2020), and Metro-Goldwyn-Maye (2021), among others.