I see Amazon as a technology company. Yes their brand is a classic book shopping site on the internet but that's not what gave them a leg up against other book shopping sites. They used shopping patterns to generate fairly usefull suggestions so I see them as a tech company at heart. For them to diversify here makes sense. Nobody else is doing virtulization like this. All the other players manually build instances and prices them per month. This drives the instance creation cost to near zero so they can charge hourly! That's a fundimental shift in the hosting industry driven by technology.
I hear you. But at the end of the day, Amazon makes money by selling things, not from hosting. Think about how much hosting service they need to sell to achieve any meaningful revenue. Then think about how much that helps their existing business. My assertion is that the answers to those questions are 1) billions of hours ($0.10 an hour doesn't go far), and 2) none. Feels like a bad investment, businesswise, even if it is cool technology.
Thanks for writing, and I look forward to seeing which of us is right!
Carl
"They used shopping patterns to generate fairly usefull suggestions" They do a decent job with this, but that's NOT why I use Amazon. I use amazon because the selection is HUGE and the shopping process is logical and step-by-step. I always feel I am clicking the right thing and I know how much longer it will take to be done.
If I were Bezos, I would shore up one of the key things Amazon does poorly that iTunes Music store does really well: on iTMS, I can conveniently listen to 30 second clips of tracks before I buy a piece of music. On Amazon, there is no acceptable way to accomplish this; you either have to install a Windows media player or Real, and I have NO interest in mucking up my system with trash software JUST to hear music clips on Amazon.
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