Amazon founder Jeff Bezos was right with these seven predictions

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• Jeff Bezos’ e-commerce predictions largely accurate

• As early as 1999, Jeff Bezos saw Amazon as the future e-commerce market leader

• Smart home technology already predicted in 1999 by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos

It goes without saying that Amazon founder Jeff Bezos has an exceptional sense for concepts with great market potential. However, how clear his vision was over 20 years ago is shown by interviews from the 90s in which he exchanged views with well-known talk show hosts about the future of the e-commerce sector.

1. Amazon will become the first port of call for online shopping

In the talks, he showed himself, among other things, self-confident about the future success of his then still very small online bookstore, which around 20 years later was to become the most used online mail order company – a position that a survey by the US news channel National Public Radio from the Confirmed in 2018, and which Bezos predicted in a 1999 interview with talk show host Charlie Rose. “We want to try to create a place where customers can find any product they would like to buy online,” Bezos told Rose, setting the benchmark for his company, which was still in its infancy at the time.

2. Shopping centers will find it difficult to compete with online retailers

In 1999, Bezos explained to the US computer magazine Wired that retail stores, especially shopping centers, only have a chance of survival if they can guarantee at least one of two core functions: On the one hand, this includes a certain entertainment value and, on the other hand, the immediate fulfillment of customer wishes.

Almost two decades later, numerous studies, including the 2017 case study by the Bocconi Students Investment Club of the Luigi Bucconi business school and the 2019 Harvard Business School study by Alberto Cavallo, mention an economic fact that was named after Bezos’ online mail order business : the so-called “Amazon Effect”. This describes the immense influence of the e-commerce sector on the retail industry, which is reflected in a slow shift in consumer spending from the environment of brick-and-mortar retailers to that of online trade. As predicted by Bezos in 1999, the consequences are the restructuring of shopping centers to increase the entertainment value by providing various leisure activities and the mechanization of retailers to increase convenience. The second point refers to the use of various technologies that make “offline shopping” faster and more convenient.

3. Internet of Things and smart home technologies are the future

“I’m a big believer in this idea that appliances are going to be connected to the internet at some point… There’s going to be a whole bunch of things that are going to be connected to the internet,” Bezos explained in an interview with Rose in 1999. In addition to the concept of smart home technology, he also predicted the global infrastructure of the Internet of Things, or IoT for short. Physical and virtual objects, which functions of the IoT have been implemented, can be networked in order to interact using information and communication technologies. In addition to smart speakers, Amazon itself has already equipped a number of other household appliances with AI technology for the virtual assistant called Alexa.

4. Amazon will sell more than just books

In 1999, the future of the then five-year-old online book trade was not yet foreseeable, so that Amazon was in direct competition with the US book retail chain Barnes & Noble. However, as Bezos explained to Wired, he’s “trying to invent the future of online retail” while Barnes & Noble are just “defending their territory.” With his statement, he drew attention to his plans to expand his company’s product range. Bezos was right: While Amazon rose to become an e-commerce behemoth, Barnes & Noble continues to operate as a bookstore made up primarily of physical retail outlets.

5. Personalized advertising is the future

“Advertising is also a useful model on the internet. You’ll be able to make ads more relevant to customers by better targeting them. That’s something that’s difficult to do on TV,” Bezos told 1999 Rose. He was also right on this point: in addition to the inevitability of personalized advertising on the Internet, more and more business models are based entirely on this concept. Facebook and Google use algorithms that recognize the interests of users and display targeted advertising based on personalized data.

6. Computers are getting faster

“There’s nothing more frustrating than having to wait a full two minutes for the computer to boot up… So I think the evolution of this feature is very important. It will eventually come, especially since a lot of people are working on it,” Bezos said in 1999 in an interview with Rose. At this point, Microsoft’s Windows 98 and Apple’s Mac OS 9 were state of the art – systems that gave users the time to make a cup of coffee and get a piece of cake during the boot process. Even then, Bezos was convinced that the instant-on function would one day become a reality. However, it still took a whole decade before this function could be established as a standard for computers using SSD flash memory and newer operating systems. The first smartphone models, which “woke up” immediately after pressing the power button to be ready for use, showed the way.

7. Household goods and basic groceries are ordered online

Bezos explained to Wired in 1999 that goods traditionally bought in brick and mortar stores would soon also be ordered electronically. In addition to office supplies and cleaning agents, he meant items that are part of the basic foodstuffs. “Most of the goods purchased in retail outlets — basic groceries, office supplies, cleaning supplies and the like — will be ordered electronically in the future,” the tech mogul predicted. While he may have overshot the mark a bit with “the majority,” according to Statista, there is a trend that says buying everyday items online is becoming more popular. Amazon itself has developed features that both speed up and simplify the process, giving customers the option of subscriptions, voice assistants and the Amazon Prime Pantry category, which only lists everyday goods.

Inna Warkus / Editor finanzen.net

Image Credits: Marvin Joseph/The Washington Post via Getty Images, David Ryder/Getty Images