Amazon: A look back at the tech titan over the years

Over the years, Amazon has grown from an online bookstore to a major company that’s a fierce competitor to Wal-Mart and Apple.

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A view of the Northern Peruvian Amazon River on June 8, 2007. Founded in 1994 by Jeff Bezos, Amazon.com was named after the South American river and began as an online bookstore. It quickly expanded to sell CDs, DVDs, toys, clothing and other miscellaneous products.

Brent Stirton / Getty Images

Amazon.com’s headquarters in Seattle. When Amazon.com went live in 1995, the retailer offered a catalogue of more than a million books in print by the year’s holiday season.

Kevin P. Casey / Bloomberg

Bezos stands with one of the company's trademark door-desks at Seattle headquarters, May 11, 2004. By 1997, Amazon was reporting revenue was growing by 25 percent a month — but it had yet to prove it could earn a profit. In the prior year, Amazon posted a loss of $5.6 million on revenue of $15.7 million. Its debut on the Nasdaq stock market in May was considered spectacular at the time. Amazon floated 3 million shares at $18 each, which soared to $30 at the opening.

Andy Rogers / AP

Amazon was on a roll by 1998, riding the wave of the dot-com boom. It paid $280 million in stock to purchase Junglee, which had search technology for comparing prices, and Planetall, which offered an address, calendar and reminder service, in an effort to expand from its origins as a bookstore and into a central online shopping place for many types of goods.

/ Bloomberg

Bezos holds a stuffed Pokemon doll as he addresses a New York news conference in 1999. Amazon stock surged in January 1999 just after it split 3-for-1. It hit $158.87 a share, making its pre-split price $476.62. Tech analyst Henry Blodget predicted at the time that Amazon would have roughly $10 billion out of total U.S. retail industry-wide sales of $ 1 trillion. But other analyst were skeptical – they said Amazon's profit margins wouldn't be any greater than top-of-the-line earthbound retailers, closer to 3 percent.

Richard Drew / AP

In 1999, Amazon was involved in legal clashes with more established companies. Wal-Mart agreed to settle a lawsuit against Amazon.com. The suit, originally filed in October 1998, alleged that Amazon had hired a group of former Wal-Mart employees — including Amazon's chief information officer, Richard Dalzell — for the purpose of gaining access to proprietary technology information. In the summer, Amazon.com asked a federal judge to allow it to refer to the New York Times bestseller list in advertisements and on its Web site. The request came after lawyers at the newspaper sent Amazon.com and Borders.com a letter ordering the companies to stop referring to the bestseller list on their sites, calling it an unfair use of the company's property.

Lisa Poole / AP

In September 1999, Amazon took another step toward creating an online supermall by inviting anyone to sell almost anything from its Web site for $9.99 a month and a slice of each transaction.

Mark Lennihan / AP

Ricardo Sandoval places packages in the right shipping boxes at an Amazon.com fulfillment center in Phoenix in 2010. When the tech bubble began to burst in 2000, Amazon’s fortunes seemed less bright. In January 2000, Amazon said it would lay off 150 employees as part of a company-wide reorganization, just five days before it was expected to report further losses in its fourth quarter. By the summer, Amazon stock had fallen by more than two-thirds, and some observers questioned whether it would survive without a shotgun marriage to a deep-pockets partner.

Ross D. Franklin / AP

The Amazon.com Web site is displayed on Aug. 31, 2011. But by 2000, Amazon was so large that when hackers attacked it, consumers who had come to depend on the retailer became frustrated, prompting a nationwide criminal investigation.

Scott Eells / Bloomberg

Edison Voong packs bottles of wine for shipment at Wine.com's distribution facility in Oakland, Calif., on May 3, 2005. Amazon.com has launched a partnership with Internet wine retailer Wine.com hoping to move more wine shoppers online and captialize on one of the last major retail markets that hasn't yet made a big splash on the Internet.

Eric Risberg / AP

Amazon Instant Video, introduced in 2006, took off slowly but in recent months Amazon has pushed its streaming video service — taking on the core business of competitors like Apple and Netflix.

Justin Sullivan / Getty Images

In 2007, Amazon announced that "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows" had become the bestselling book in the site’s history. Amazon introduced the Kindle e-book reader in December 2007 to lukewarm reviews. Priced at $399, it was sold out through Christmas. But The Washington Post’s Rob Pegoraro wrote that “Between the dark-gray text and the light-gray background, its contrast falls short of a newspaper's and is inferior to that of a book. Worse, the Kindle's sluggish screen needs about 1 1/2 seconds to draw a new page, during which time the next page distractingly appears as a photo-negative image of itself before settling into place.”

Mark Lennihan / AP

Tony Hsieh, president, founder and chief executive of Zappos.com, poses for a portrait with his autobiography, "Delivering Happiness," on June 17, 2010. In November 2009, Zappos was acquired by Amazon.com in a deal valued at $1.2 billion on the day of closing.

Noah Berger / Bloomberg

Bezos introduces the new Kindle Fire tablet computer at a news conference in New York, Sept. 28, 2011. Amazon.com is taking aim at Apple's bestselling iPad with a device that's smaller and less than half the price.

Emile Wamsteker / Bloomberg

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