Most Influential Person of the Year: Jeff Bezos

Amazon is changing the face of information technology with its approach to “cloud computing” and expanding on one of the greatest technologies of all time: the book

Jeff Bezos [ CEO, Amazon.com ]

Jeff Bezos is used to skeptics. After all, in the early days when he operated his online bookstore out of a Pioneer Square warehouse in 1995, plenty of people thought there wasn’t much money to be made selling books. He proved them wrong then—and as his company continues to innovate and grow (Amazon is arguably the world’s leading online retailer), the guy who changed how we thought about bookstores is now changing how we think about reading (hello, Kindle!).

Perhaps most significantly, in the last year—when iconic local companies such as Starbucks and Boeing are struggling—Amazon is not. Analysts expect the company to earn more than $750 million, up nearly 400 percent from 2006, on sales of more than $22 billion.

An intense entrepreneur with a rare combination of vision, drive, guts, technical savvy and business acumen, Bezos has built a company worth $40 billion (at press time), and a personal net worth of more than $8 billion. And he’s just getting started, opening up new frontiers by redefining old industries. Amazon is changing the face of information technology with its approach to “cloud computing,” a set of new Web-based services that enable customers to move their computer operations onto Amazon computers and only pay for the computer power they actually use. Amazon now hosts many of the operations of such clients as NASDAQ and The New York Times, making it the envy of software giant Microsoft, which is belatedly trying to break into the business.

And with its Kindle—a handheld portable electronic device that allows the owner to download books (from Amazon.com, of course)—Amazon is offering up what it sees as an improvement on one of the greatest technologies of all time: the book. “We had to match the book’s most important feature, which is the ability to get out of the way so you can lose yourself in the author’s world,” says Bezos, speaking from Amazon’s headquarters in the Pacific Medical building, perched high above Seattle. “But we also had to do things a book could never do. So we made it really easy to look up a word’s definition while you are reading. We made it possible to buy a book and read it 60 seconds later, and we made it possible to change the font size and get text to speech.” That new book is likely to be worth $300 million in sales in the next year, if analyst predictions are right.

Strangely, the company that has become so familiar to consumers around the world, remains somewhat hidden in Seattle, absent from civic discourse, and contributing little to local social and cultural institutions. That could change. Next year Amazon moves into a South Lake Union campus, where it will occupy 1.7 million square feet in 11 buildings with room for 8,000–9,000 workers. With that many employees in the middle of a city facing issues such as traffic, crime and transportation, Bezos may find it hard to keep his company disengaged from the city. But he’s not tipping his hat about his next move.
“I can only say, ‘Stay tuned.’”

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TAKING OFF
Books may keep Jeff Bezos grounded, but he takes flight with Blue Origin, his company based in Kent that is developing “a rocket-propelled vehicle designed to routinely fly multiple astronauts into suborbital space.” The vehicle has already gone through tests on a 300,000-acre site Bezos acquired in west Texas and could be ready for its first unmanned space flight in 2011. But while he’s eager to talk about some inventions he’s funding—like the Kindle—this is a subject about which Bezos seldom offers public comments.