On July 16^th, 1995, Amazon’s website went live to the public. To put that date into historical context, that was the same year that Netscape went public. It was also the same year that at my company, the CTO and I proposed something we called the “e-store initiative ” to the Board of Directors. We were told that if we ever proposed such poppycock again, we’d be fired on the spot. I suppose it’s just as well that we were tossed from the meeting – the technology that had triggered our grand vision was Mosaic (a pre-Netscape browser).

Anyway, twenty years ago on July 16^th it was Amazon’s big launch day, and the initial offering was “books “. We all know how that turned out now, but at the time Jeff Bezos’ creation was greeted with a great deal of skepticism, even by book publishers, who didn’t think that Bezos understood how the book trade worked. Bezos’ later recalled that, “We saw it very differently. We don’t make money when we sell things. We make money when we help customers make purchase decisions. “[1]

A skeptic could pick apart Mr. Bezos’s comments: what does “make money ” mean? Surely, until recently it didn’t mean “profits “. In January ’15, the Wall Street Journal reported that, “Amazon had a loss of $241 million for the full fiscal year, as operating expenses climbed 20% to $88.8 billion, essentially wiping out $89 billion in sales. ” The Seattle company has in the past kept its investors happy with top line growth and its investments – but that can only last so long, especially for a 20-year-old company! There are signs everywhere that investors want Amazon to grow up and become more “traditional ” by delivering net profits to the bottom line. Popular stock analyst Jim Cramer calls that “a bit of a pipe dream. “

Profits nor not, the important part of Mr. Bezos’ comment is that bit about helping customers making purchase decisions. It’s been a pretty standard part of speeches that I give to ask those in the audience how many use their mobile devices to read reviews while shopping? Typically over 60% or so will raise their hands. I then ask how many of those are reading reviews on Amazon? About 2/3 of those who read reviews while shopping will acknowledge reading Amazon reviews, even when they are in a Target or a Best Buy or some other Amazon competitor. Of course the point of such an exercise is twofold; first to point out that consumers use the digital “channels ” while in a physical store to make better decisions, and secondly, that retailers can and should do a better job at getting consumers to read their content.

But however you look at it, that’s a change that Amazon triggered, and we all are impacted by it in some way. The question remains, how is Amazon going to make money doing that? I think the difficulty in answering that is the driving force behind all of Amazon’s investments to make the purchase path-of-least-resistance an “Amazon ” one. That’s the harder nut to crack, but it’s clearly what the giant virtual marketplace is trying to do.

Amazon has the peculiar distinction of being loved by consumers and reviled by retailers while for investors the relationship is best described as “complicated “. But there’s no question that the company has been one of the leaders in the fight to make the Retail Industry more responsive to consumers’ need for more relevant solutions to their lifestyle needs, and for that I wish it a very Happy Birthday!