Amazon's rise to the top explained in "The Everything War"

As Amazon faces a Federal Trade Commission lawsuit, a new book is out with a fresh look at how it went from a Bellevue garage to a sprawling empire of online retail, cloud computing, and logistics — and a political lightning rod.

Dana Mattioli, an award-winning journalist who covered Amazon for The Wall Street Journal, said that rise can be attributed to hyper aggressive business practices and culture. It's those business practices and cultural expectations, she said, that still drive the company today. And they may be, in part, what led to an FTC lawsuit. Last week, the FTC filed a motion in that case, accusing Amazon of destroying years' worth of relevant data.