Thursday, December 16, 2004

MIT Tech Review on Amazon Web Services

Wade Roush raves about Amazon's web services in MIT Technology Review:
    While companies such as Google and Microsoft are also experimenting with the idea of letting outsiders tap into their databases and use their content in unpredictable ways, none is proceeding more aggressively than Amazon.

    The company has, in essence, outsourced much of its R&D, and a growing portion of its actual sales, to an army of thousands of software developers ... The result: a syndicate of mini-Amazons operating at very little cost to Amazon itself and capturing customers who might otherwise have gone elsewhere.

    It's as if Starbucks were to recruit 50,000 of its most loyal caffeine addicts to strap urns of coffee to their backs each morning and, for a small commission, spend the day dispensing the elixir to their officemates.

    The strategy behind Amazon Web Services is to give programmers virtually unlimited access to the very foundation of Amazon's business -- its product database -- whether they are inside or outside the company's walls.
Web services engage creative and talented outside software developers. It's distributed research and development, reaching beyond the walls of the firm to seek innovation.

See also my earlier posts ([1] [2] [3] [4]) on Amazon web services.

[via KOKOGIAK]

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