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Amazon seeks new products
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February 1, 1999: 3:25 p.m. ET
Internet book seller CEO says he wants to 'invent the future of e-commerce'
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DAVOS, Switzerland (CNNfn) - As founder and chief executive of Amazon.com, Jeff Bezos certainly knows how to sell books, music and videos over the Internet. Now, he wants to expand into other areas as well.
"A year from now Barnes & Noble won't even consider us a direct competitor," Bezos told CNNfn in an interview Monday at the World Economic Forum. "What we're trying to do is invent the future of e-commerce."
While Bezos declined to say which markets he intends to attack next, he said a number of potential areas are on his hit list, including computer hardware and software.
Amazon (AMZN), which was founded in 1994, has become one of the "blue chip" Internet stocks, even though the company has yet to turn a profit. Over the last year its stock price has gone from a low of just under 10 to a high of nearly 200, before easing back to its current level of 119-3/4.
Despite his astounding success so far, Bezos is not standing still.
"There's no rest for the weary, I totally agree with (Intel Corp.'s) Andy Grove - only the paranoid survive." Bezos warns his employees "our customers are loyal right up to the moment someone offers them a better service."
As for those who criticize Internet firms for not being able to turn a profit, Bezos warns them not to take the short view. "It's a mistake to optimize on short-term profitability."
He warned though, that Internet stocks are not for the faint-hearted, despite his past as a quantitative hedge fund manager on Wall Street. "Internet shares are extremely volatile, they're inappropriate to be more than a small proportion of a private investor's portfolio," said Bezos.
"We're trying to build the most customer-centric company in the world," according to Bezos, who first spotted the potential of the Internet in 1994, while working at Wall Street investment house D. E. Shaw. "I genuinely believe the balance of power online shifts away from the merchant toward the consumer."
"In spring 1994 I found that Web usage was growing at 2,300 percent a year, and I thought 'Wow! This thing's going to be ubiquitous very fast,'" he said. He then drew up a list of 20 of the best products to sell over the Internet "and books were number one."
Scott McNealy, the chief executive of Sun Microsystems Inc. (SUNW), attributes Amazon's success to the ease in which customers can shop online.
"They've made it so easy to buy books," he said. "You buy books when you normally would have bought flowers or candy or something else. It's actually incremental demand, it isn't like bookstores are going out of business, people are buying more books."
Now the question for Amazon's competitors is what other products are on Bezos' list. 
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