Amazon started in 1994 when Jeff Bezos left a Wall Street job to sell books online, betting on the raw growth of the internet. He deliberately chose books first — a huge catalogue no physical shop could stock — then expanded, category by category, into the "everything store" and a logistics network of warehouses, delivery and Prime memberships that reset customer expectations for speed.
The accidental cloud giant
Amazon's most influential invention had nothing to do with retail. To run its own sprawling websites, it had built reliable internal infrastructure — and in 2006 it started renting that infrastructure to everyone as Amazon Web Services, beginning with S3 (storage) and EC2 (compute).
Infrastructure as a utility
This was a genuinely new idea: instead of buying servers, a startup could rent computing and storage by the hour and scale up or down on demand. AWS turned infrastructure into a utility, like electricity, and made it possible to launch a global service from a laptop. It created the public cloud market — later joined by Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud — and for years its profits quietly funded the rest of Amazon.
Retail, cloud, and AI
Today Amazon is really several giants in one: the world's largest online retailer, the leading cloud provider, a media and devices business (Prime Video, Alexa), and a heavy investor in artificial intelligence. Its cloud story is also why "we build it, then we teach it" is such a natural model — the same infrastructure that runs a business becomes the thing others learn to build on.