Encyclopedia of Computer Science and Technology

inding 45Looking for a place to set up shop, Bezos decided on Seattle,partly because the state of Washington had a relativelysmall population (the only customers who would have topay sales tax) yet had a growing pool of technically trainedworkers, thanks to the growth of Microsoft and other companiesin the area. After several false starts he decided tocall his store Amazon, deciding that the name of the Earth’sbiggest river would be suited to earth’s biggest bookstore.Amazon’s first headquarters was a converted garage.Bezos soon decided that the existing software for mailorderbusinesses was too limited and set a gifted programmernamed Shel Kaphan to work creating a custom programthat could keep track not only of each book in stock, buthow long it would take to get more copies from the publisheror book distributor.By mid-1995 Amazon.com was ready go online from anew Seattle office using $145,553 contributed by Bezos’smother from the family trust. As word about the storespread through Internet chat rooms and a listing on Yahoo!,the orders began to pour in and Bezos had to struggle tokeep up. Despite the flood of orders, the business was losingmoney as expenses piled up even more quickly.Bezos went to Silicon Valley in search of venture capital.Bezos’s previous experience as a Wall Street “star,” togetherwith his self-confidence, enabled him to raise $1 million.Bezos believed that momentum was the key to long-termsuccess. The company’s motto became “get big fast.” Revenuewas poured back into the business, expanding salesinto other product lines such as music, video, electronics,and software. The other key element of Bezos’s growth strategywas to take advantage of the vast database that Amazonwas accumulating—not only information about books andother products, but about what products a given individualor type of customer was buying. Once a customer hasbought something from Amazon, he or she is greeted byname and given recommendations for additional purchasesbased upon what items other customers who had boughtthat item had also purchased. Customers are encouragedto write reviews of books and other items so that each customergets the sense of being part of a virtual peer group.By 1997, the year of its first public stock offering, Amazonseemed to be growing at an impressive rate. A yearlater the stock was worth almost $100 a share, and by 1999Jeff Bezos’s personal wealth neared $7.5 billion. Bezos andAmazon proved to be one of the few Internet businessesto weather the “dot-bust” collapse of 2000 and 2001. In2003 Amazon.com chalked up its first annual profit, andthe company’s stock prices tripled during that time.Bezos gained a reputation as a very demanding CEO,insisting on recruiting top talent, then demanding that projectsset bold goals and complete them ahead of schedule.The pressure resulted in high turnover of top executives,but Bezos has also been quick to encourage and rewardinitiative. (The company’s “Just Do It” program encouragesmanagers to start projects without asking permission oftheir superiors.)Aside from Amazon.com, Bezos has maintained hisinterest in space travel. In 2002 he founded a companycalled Blue Origin, whose spaceship project has remainedshrouded in secrecy. However, in January 2007 the companyreleased video of the first successful (albeit brief) testof a prototype suborbital passenger craft.Bezos has written a new chapter in the history of retailing,making him a 21st-century counterpart to such pioneersas Woolworth and Montgomery Ward. Time magazineacknowledged this by making him its 1999 Person of theYear, while Internet Magazine put Bezos on its list of the 10persons who have most influenced the development of theInternet.Further ReadingBlue Origin website. Available online. URL: http://public.blueorigin.com/index.html.Accessed April 10, 2007.Byers, Ann. Jeff Bezos: The Founder of Amazon.com. New York:Rosen Publishing Group, 2006.Marcus, James. Amazonia: Five Years at the Epicenter of the Dot.Com Juggernaut. New York: New Press, 2004.Spector, Robert. Amazon.com: Get Big Fast: Inside the RevolutionaryBusiness Model that Changed the World. New York: HarperBusiness, 2000.bindingDesigners of program compilers are faced with the questionof when to translate a statement written in the source languageinto final instructions in machine language (see alsoassembler). This can happen at different times dependingon the nature of the statement and the decision of the compilerdesigner.Many programming languages use formal data types(such as integer, floating point, double, string, and so on)that result in allocation of an exact amount of storage spaceto hold the data (see data types). A statement that declaresa variable with such a type can be effectively bound immediately(that is, a final machine code statement can be generated).This is also called compile-time binding.However, there are a variety of statements for whichbinding must be deferred until more information becomesavailable. For example, it is common for programmers to uselibraries of precompiled routines. A statement that calls sucha routine cannot be turned immediately into machine languagebecause the compiler doesn’t know the actual addresswhere the routine will be embedded in the final compiledprogram. (That address will be determined by a programcalled a linker that links the object code from the sourceprogram to the library routines called upon by that code.)Another aspect of binding arises when there is morethan one object in a program with the same name. In languagessuch as C or Pascal that use a nested block structure,lexical binding can determine that a name refers to theclosest declaration of that name—that is, the smallest scopethat contains that name (see variable). In a few languagessuch as Lisp, however, the reference for a name depends onhow (or for what) the function is being called, so bindingcan be done only at run time.Binding and Object-Oriented LanguagesThe use of polymorphism in object-oriented languages suchas C++ raises a similar issue. Here there can be a base class