Click over to TechCrunch to check out an amazing slide show put together by the consulting firm faberNovel that offers an incredibly detailed look at how Amazon came to dominate e-commerce, expanding from an online bookseller to a household name synonymous with buying stuff on the Internet.
I’ve read that in the mid-nineties Jeff Bezos brainstormed the details of his Amazon startup in the cafe section of a Barnes & Noble superstore in Seattle. Somehow I suspect that even if an employee had overheard him and could somehow have called Len Riggio and told him bn.com *still* wouldn’t have opened before it did — in late 1997.