Saturday, March 24, 2012

Excellent article on Amazon's push to define cloud computing in its own terms

Amazon AWS moves freak out partners and rivals alike


Articles like this are the reason why I love reading GigaOm, one of the best providers of information about technology businesses and the tech market in general. To my non-techie friends, fair warning that this article has some jargon that might need Googling to understand (like PaaS and IaaS), but the value in the article is in its recognition of a true paradigm shift that is presently occurring in what the internet is and how everyone uses it. Simply put, Amazon is defining what people mean by "cloud computing." And they're doing that in addition to running the world's largest bookseller and retailer. 

This article shows why, in my opinion, Jeff Bezos and his people at Amazon will one day be regarded as one of the best corporate teams in American history, spoken of in the same regard as Apple and Microsoft and their legendary former CEOs, GE and Jack Welch, Warren Buffett and Berkshire Hathaway, and maybe a handful of others. 

When people think of Amazon, most people think of it first as a place to buy books online. That's all it was when the company started nearly 20 years ago. Most also know that Amazon has branched out into other areas, such as e-books and other downloadable electronic media (songs, movies, TV episodes, Android Apps, video games), plus a bunch of other physical goods, like groceries, hardware, consumer electronics, and just about anything else one wants to buy and doesn't mind waiting a day or two to get. 

What people may not realize is that Amazon is not just the world's biggest retailer - a virtual Walmart in the ether that magically mails you stuff when you click a few buttons. The company's demand for computer servers and data center storage and computing space has given it the massive, virtually unparalleled purchasing power to own one of the world's largest data and cloud computing infrastructure businesses. Companies like Dropbox are fundamentally just a great idea, a compelling brand and a cool logo, and a bit of software that runs on top of a chunk of storage in Amazon's Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3). Amazon S3 is one of several "Amazon Web Services" products. 

Non-techies have probably never heard of Amazon Web Services or if they have, they likely don't have a clear idea of what it is. People who use cloud file-sync services like Dropbox have been using Amazon Web Services products without even knowing it. Chances are that even non-techies who aren't already using some kind of cloud service will be doing so in the next couple of years. 

As much as probably any other company ever has, Amazon has changed and is continuing to change the way business is done worldwide. The company is headed by a visionary computer geek who, in my opinion, is every bit as brilliant as Steve Jobs, but just a lot less famous.