the everything store

today was amazon's 20th anniversary and they celebrated by launching an inaugural  "amazon prime day", a day where prime members could purchase select goods at steep discounts. while the deeply discounted products on amazon prime day were generally unappealing to most of the people i spoke with at the office and skewered by customers on twitter and facebook, amazon's daily sales were up around 80% by noon, as compared with a year earlier. shocking!

in honor of amazon's first prime day, i thought it was also overdue for a review of the everything store, brad stone's tell-all tale about the online retailer which started out in a garage (surprise surprise) in the then quiet little city of seattle.

this "biography" about jeff bezos and his company, amazon, is interesting, because it wasn't a sanctioned book by bezos, nor was he interviewed for this book in particular. the author, however, is very knowledgeable about the tech industry and mentions his various writing careers at the nytimes and bloomberg businessweek.

without giving away too much, in this book, stone goes into great detail about bezos's childhood, and draws many parallels with that of steve jobs, another silicon valley figurehead. he then