(Amazon.com, Seattle, WA, www.amazon.com) The largest online shopping site and one of the most widely known e-commerce sites on the Web. Founded by Jeff Bezos in 1995, it had 11 employees by year's end. Within four years, it had more than 1,600 employees and four million customers.

Amazon started out as an online bookstore, constantly making news with the number of titles it offered for sale. In the late 1990s, Amazon had more than four million titles after adding CDs, videos, DVDs and games. It continued to add new lines of business including toys, consumer electronics, software, power tools, home improvement products, online auctions and datacenter services (see EC2).