PUBLIC MARKS from mozkart with tag amazon

Jeff Bezos' Risky Bet Amazon's CEO wants to run your business with the technology behind his Web site. But Wall street wants him to mind the store

WebOS services are going to be utilized by thousands of companies - and will power the next generation of web applications. Amazon is at this point leading the charge of the big Internet companies to capture this potentially huge market. There is a very long, but interesting, cover story in today's BusinessWeek entitled Jeff Bezos' Risky Bet. The article focuses on the transformation of the e-commerce giant into a software company. The growing stack of Amazon Web Services clearly points to a sea change in the Seattle e-commerce giant. Indeed Amazon is beginning to look more like an alternative Microsoft for the web computing era!

At the core of the Amazon strategy are the Web Services. The Amazon team takes the concepts of search, storage, lookup and management the data and turns them into pay-per-fetch and pay-per-space web services. This is a brilliant strategy and Amazon is certainly a visionary company. But what impresses me the most as an engineer is their ability to take very complex problems, solve them and then shrink wrap their solutions with a simple and elegant API. Eat your own dog food Perhaps the most admirable thing about the Amazon efforts is that they are productizing their own infrastructure. It may not be widely known, but Amazon.com itself runs on all these services. The blocks that comprise the biggest store on Earth are servicing each other! For example, the site relies on eCommerce service and the Simple Storage Service. The lack of the real customer feedback is a notorious problem in software engineering. The gap between the what software engineer thinks is useful and what the real customers want is a lot of times just hard to bridge. And how do you solve this problem for something like Amazon Web Services? Amazon's answer - turn ½ of the company to be the customers of the other half. This 'eat your own dog motto' forces the Web Services strategy on the success path. Failure is just simply not an option, since it is going to undermine the operations of the main business.

Deux solutions pour vendre sur le Web Les entreprises ayant opté pour le service « fulfillment » laissent Amazon s’occuper de stocker leurs produits dans les entrepôts d’Amazon. Quand un client passe commande Amazon expédie le colis et s’occupe même du retour du colis si celui-ci ne convient pas. Ce service coûte 0.5$ par colis plus 0.8$ par kilogramme et 0.45$ pour 0.3 m³ de stockage. Le « Webstore » est plus complet, il comprend l’hébergement du site marchand ainsi que sa réalisation, le professionnel n’a qu’à y mettre son logo et les photos de ses produits, l’attribution d’une certaine bande passante et le système de paiement. Amazon demande en échange 7% de commission sur chaque produit acheté et 59.95$ par mois. Ajoutez à cela que pour pouvoir bénéficier de ces services les entreprises doivent être enregistrées comme appartenant au Amazon Pro Merchant qui coûte 39.95$ par mois.