Jeff Bezos: "Blind-Alley" Explorer

The CEO says Amazon is so innovative because it's always probing, unafraid to make mistakes until it finds a huge, broad avenue

Provide news feedback or report an error

Confidential tip?

Send a tip to our reporters

Site feedback:

Take our Survey

August 19, 2004 at 4:00 AM UTC

This article is for subscribers only.

After going from Internet poster boy in the late 1990s to Internet piñata by 2000, Amazon.com founder and Chief Executive Officer Jeffrey Bezos has survived, and then some. Despite second-quarter earnings that came in a penny per share shy of analysts' expectations -- tanking its stock -- Amazon (AMZN ) continues to log the steady quarterly profits that some once predicted it would never make.

That's thanks in large part to the e-tailer's constant innovations, from permanent free-shipping offers that recharged sales growth to features such as Search Inside the Book, which lets people do Google-like searches of the full texts of thousands of books. And customers like the changes. On Aug. 17, a survey of 20 e-commerce sites by market researcher Vividence put Amazon on top in customer satisfaction.