Amazon

Last year, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos told Fast Company, “The balance of power continues to shift toward consumers and away from companies.” One exception: Amazon itself, which amasses more power daily. Membership of its two-day-delivery program, Amazon Prime, grew by millions in 2013; its grocery-delivery service expanded to Los Angeles and San Francisco, hooking customers into regular delivery habits; and its Kindle Fire HDX, with an instant tech support feature, became an attractive alternative to the iPad. Competitors such as eBay try to compete, but Amazon’s Sunday-delivery partnership with the U.S. Postal Service–and its lofty promise of 30-minute drone delivery by 2015–put it far, far ahead. Yet Bezos still believes that it’s day one for the e-commerce giant. “There’s still so much you can do with technology to improve the customer experience,” he told Fast Company in September. “That’s the sense in which I believe it’s still day one, and that it’s early in the day. If anything, the rate of change is accelerating.” But with the combination of Amazon Prime, AmazonFresh, and the widespread fulfillment centers, it looks like Amazon is still going to be near impossible to catch.