Amazon Opens Bookstore in Seattle
The opening of Amazon.com's first brick-and-mortar store on Tuesday proves that software is not really "eating the world," as venture capitalist Marc Andreessen put it in 2011.
In his widely noted Wall Street Journal column about predatory software, Andreessen wrote:
Today, the world's largest bookseller, Amazon, is a software company -- its core capability is its amazing software engine for selling virtually everything online, no retail stores necessary. On top of that, while Borders was thrashing in the throes of impending bankruptcy, Amazon rearranged its web site to promote its Kindle digital books over physical books for the first time. Now even the books themselves are software.
Retail stores are still not strictly necessary, and yet Amazon now has one in Seattle.
