Amazon was founded on July 5, 1994, by Jeff Bezos, who chose the Seattle area for its abundance of technical talent, as Microsoft was in the area.[31]
Amazon went public in May 1997. It began selling music and videos in 1998, and began international operations by acquiring online sellers of books in the United Kingdom and Germany. In the subsequent year, it initiated the sale of a diverse range of products, including music, video games, consumer electronics, home improvement items, software, games, and toys.[32][33]
In 2002, it launched Amazon Web Services (AWS), which initially focused on providing APIs for web developers to build web applications on top of Amazon’s ecommerce platform.[34][35] In 2004, AWS was expanded to provide website popularity statistics and web crawler data from the Alexa Web Information Service.[36] AWS later shifted toward providing enterprise services with Simple Storage Service (S3) in 2006,[37] and Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) in 2008,[38] allowing companies to rent data storage and computing power from Amazon. In 2006, Amazon also launched the Fulfillment by Amazon program, which allowed individuals and small companies (called “third-party sellers”) to sell products through Amazon’s warehouses and fulfillment infrastructure.[39]