Earlier today, Amazon CTO Werner Vogels tweeted out an interesting look into Amazon’s past.
If want to learn more about building for the long term you should start with Jeff Bezos’ 1997 letter to shareholders http://t.co/IjmT51ua8T
— Werner Vogels (@Werner) July 28, 2014
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).