A visit to learn about Amazon's technology and services in the current headquarters city of Seattle helps reveal why the company is growing so fast that it wants a second, duplicate headquarters location.
"Amazon is one of the most remarkable companies I've ever covered, and it's remarkable because it can surprise people so much," said Todd Bishop, a journalist with Geekwire in Seattle.
Since moving to its current Seattle headquarters in 2010, Amazon has assembled more than 40,000 employees with positions slated for 6,000 more as the current Seattle campus continues to expand.
"Just in the last three or four years you've seen this explosion of products and innovation from this company, and it's one of the most remarkable stories I would say of American invention and creation of a business," Bishop said.
Amazon started in 1994 as an online book seller, then introduced the Kindle reading pad device. Its products now include Fire Stick TV, and Amazon drone delivery is in the near future.
Bishop is currently testing a new product for which Amazon is sharing its Alexa speech recognition technology that originally appeared in Amazon Echo devices. A lamp from General Electric called Sol is using Alexa to provide search-question answers, which also illuminate the light ring.
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The recent acquisition of Austin-based Whole Foods demonstrates Amazon's expansion into brick and mortar retail locations.
"A lot of what they're doing is trying to bridge the digital and the physical world as far as retail, and that's what the Whole Foods acquisition is all about," Bishop said.
Amazon already offers home food delivery with Amazon Fresh in Seattle, as well as North Texas and a few other locations.
A test storefront location called Amazon Go is open only to employees for now at a building in the Seattle headquarters campus, but Bishop said it is intended to open to the general public soon. New technology will allow customers to walk in and grab what they want from convenient store shelves and automatically charge it to an Amazon account.
"It senses that you're there, and you don't go through a checkout line. It's checkout-less," Bishop said.
This month, Amazon announced it plans to duplicate its Seattle headquarters in another North American city to expand even further. With up to 50,000 workers in the second headquarters, Amazon plans to eventually fill the equivalent of four Bank of America Plazas, the tallest building in Dallas.
Matt McIlwain and his Seattle firm Madrona Venture Group were early Amazon investors.
"I like to think of them as an innovation factory," he said. "Talent congregates where talent is, and we've certainly seen them in the start-up community where Madrona, our firm, has been investing in start-ups, not only Amazon, but others, for a couple of decades now. You want to be able to have early access to talented people in where the next area of opportunities are."
It benefits other businesses like restaurants that cater to the Seattle tech crowd.
Tom Douglas Restaurants has 17 locations in the Amazon Seattle campus area. Now with 1,000 employees of his own, owner Tom Douglas recognizes the changes Amazon has brought to his city and the business world.
"I don't think anyone realized how much you and I like shopping online. Look at the malls across America that are suffering. So this is all new stuff. This is all exciting. This is the way the world is headed," Douglas said.
Bishop believes Toronto, Canada, may have an edge in the North American HQ2 competition. He thinks Amazon looks at the situation as an engineering problem with the need for complete and total redundant back up, including a second country to keep serving customers in any situation.
"They do it with their data services. They create cloud servers all over the world," he said.
But Bishop also said Amazon founder Jeff Bezos has Texas connections, and Texas should not be counted out.
McIlwain said the intense HQ2 competition could net more than one winner.
"Maybe they decide that there's two or three cities that they put major presences in rather than call any one HQ2," he said.
While some traditional retail locations struggle, North Texas and other regions are lining up as Amazon suitors, envisioning the Seattle tech surge could happen to them.
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