The Merchant King – Jeff Bezos: "This man was our millionth customer, and I had flown to Japan with a few of my employees to hand-deliver his books. He ordered Andrew Morton's Diana: Her True Story in Her Own Words and Windows NT: An Administrator's Bible, which is a pretty funny combination, I guess. He was incredibly gracious and kind, and the whole thing got carried on Japanese news stations. If you look closely at the photo, you can see that all of our employees signed the box. The symbolism was important – we were celebrating our millionth customer, not our millionth dollar. In 1997, our success was anything but assured. That was the year Amazon-dot-toast was coined. When I think back, I'm amazed how quickly we've grown. We celebrate our 10th anniversary July 16, which coincidentally is the same day Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince (book 6) comes out. Based on preorders, we expect to generate more sales on that book on that day than we did in our entire first year."
– Interview by Jeff Howe
Timeline: 1997 $150,000 – Amount paid for business.com domain. Two years later, it resells for a record $7.5 million.
Jan: Dr. Koop's wild ride: Former surgeon general founds drkoop.com. Company launches, goes public, hits billion-dollar market cap, goes kaput.
First webcast of presidential inauguration.
Mar: Heaven's Gate cult of Web designers details UFO beliefs on Internet, then commits mass suicide.
May: He got rooked: Grandmaster Garry Kasparov loses chess match to IBM's Deep Blue.
Jul: NASA's Web site for Pathfinder's Martian journey attracts a record 46 million hits in one day. (When the Mars rover lands in 2004, Nasa.gov gets 404 million hits.)
Aug: Couch Couch revolution: TiVo launches, quietly begins work on first personal video recorder.
Dec: Usenet poster Jorn Barger coins weblog to describe his online journal.
Bezos (right), founder and CEO of Amazon.com, delivering a package in Tokyo in October 1997.
10 Years That Changed the World
| Intro
A Decade of Genius and Madness
