Amazon with its webservice offering has morphed itself into the operating system (OS) for e-commerce retailer. A computer's operating system provides core infrastructure such as process and memory management, controlling input/output devices, security, and networking. As an application developer, you can simply assume this OS functionality to be available to you. Similarly, as a e-commerce retail website developer, you can expect Amazon to provide core infrastructure such as remote shopping cart, detailed information about products, warehouse management to store, ship, handle returns of the products (and even though non-tangible, peace of mind of Amazon branding). You only have to concentrate on value addition on top of core functionality supplied by Amazon, and earn affiliation dollars.
Its a gutsy decision on part of Amazon to open its doors to proprietary data (product description, customer feedback) via webservice that took years to collect. Amazon has been exemplary in providing such a webservice offering. This will surely act as a catalyst for others and will lead them to follow the same path as Amazon, in turn, leading us all to interesting times ahead.
Amazon's Simple Storage Service (S3) and Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) shows yet another aspect of innovation at Amazon lead by Jeff Bezos. These would have been an obvious offering from some data storage company (it makes me wonder as to why none of the data storage company offered this). But this coming from Amazon shows Jeff's multi-faceted vision, and the fact that companies like Amazon do not fear sailing uncharted waters.
With its webservice, S3, and EC2 offerings, Amazon has truly become the operating system of e-commerce.
1 comment:
Ashwin,
Excellent article.
You said.."These would have been an obvious offering from some data storage company (it makes me wonder as to why none of the data storage company offered this)." There are several reasons- first, storage companies don't have service and operations capabilities. They know how to sell boxes but don't know how to keep these servers up 24 by 7. The second is business model impedance mismatch. Storage companies are used to charging upfront (millions) for storage they sell whereas the Amazon model is pay-as-you-go. Its hard to switch business models for various reasons- Wall St may lower guidance, your key sales people may defect if they don't see opportunity to sell big contracts, etc. This is the same reason Microsoft is not a leader in hosted email, SAP is not a leader in hosted CRM, etc.
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