Business Week pays a call on Amazon.com CEO Jeff Bezos, “the onetime Internet poster boy who quickly became a post-dot-com piñata,” as the online vendor prepares to unveil a distributed computing service called Elastic Compute Cloud at this week’s Web 2.0 conference. But the new business plan runs deeper than that. “Amazon is starting to rent out just about everything it uses to run its own business,” the magazine reports, “from rack space in its 10 million square feet of warehouses worldwide to spare computing capacity on its thousands of servers, data storage on its disk drives, and even some of the millions of lines of software code it has written to coordinate all that.”
An interview with Bezos reveals some of the strategic thinking behind the new moves:
“We have three businesses today, and they’re all customer-facing. There’s the business that has the 59 million active customers, it’s our consumer-facing business, and that’s the business that we’re best known for. Then there’s our seller-facing business, so that’s the second set of customers. That business has grown very rapidly, and we have everything from tiny used bookshops and sellers on our platform up to companies as big as Target. We have over a million sellers. Then there’s the third business, which is the most nascent of these, our developer-facing business…”
“Neither analysts nor investors think Amazon’s business is in danger of collapse,” says Business Week. “It’s just that they’re slowly losing confidence in Bezos’ promises.” To which the CEO himself counters: “I honestly think that many of the investors that invest in Amazon really like our approach and our strategy… We hope this longer-term approach, in and of itself, is a competitive advantage in a world where many companies either don’t have the opportunity to do that or are unwilling to do that.”
