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Jeff Bezos

By Bill Gates

source: Times Inc.

Gates is a co-chair and trustee of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the chair of Microsoft

微軟主席比爾.蓋茲描述全球最大零售網站亞馬遜的創辦人兼執行長傑夫.貝佐斯。

此篇文章選自"時代雜誌2009全球100位最具影響力人物"。

Related article: M.I.A.


Genuine pioneers don't stop after just one discovery or innovation. They are driven to build on their accomplishments and to follow them into new frontiers. Jeff Bezos, 45, the founder of Amazon.com — and my Seattle-area neighboris a great example of one of those insatiable pioneers of business and technology.


He was one of the very first entrepreneurs to make a big bet on electronic commerce, quitting a promising career on Wall Street to move west and start Amazon when a lot of people didn't yet even know what the Internet was. He understood from the beginning that he wasn't just inventing a new and more efficient way for people to find books they wanted to buy but that he was also helping to define a fundamentally new way to conduct a consumer retail business. Indeed, Jeff's idea was just as revolutionary as when Sears, Roebuck started its mail-order catalog business a century earlier.


Pioneers are also survivors. You have to have a lot of respect for how Jeff's vision and determination carried his young company through the dotcom bust early in the decade. While other e-businesses flamed out in spectacular fashion, Amazon held steady and eventually broadened its inventories and lines of business far beyond what even the largest retailers can boast of offering.


Lately, Jeff's pioneering spirit has taken him in some new directions. He would like nothing more than to be the first to provide a cheap and safe way for anyone to fly into space and started a company called Blue Origin to devise the technology. That's pretty cool, but his biggest legacy of all might be more down to eartha modest-looking white-and-silver digital device called the Kindle. This electronic book is Jeff's brainchild and may well revolutionize not only how we acquire books and periodicals but also how bookworms like me actually read them. That would put him in the same ranks as Johannes Gutenberg.