Hi ya! Nice of you to come on by. Fresh coffee in the pot next to the display of virtual goodies. Choose your pick and c’mon over. I want to ask you…have you ever bought anything from Amazon online? I have…from Amazon US and Amazon UK. Would you believe that Amazon.com controls about one-third of the ecommerce traffic in the USA and Canada? That’s what the business press estimates. They are now doing about $34 billion annually which easily makes them the largest electronic powerhouse for commerce on the Internet. They went through some tough times to get where they are today.
For the first ten years, Amazon CEO and founder Jeff Bezos watched his company post losses every year. With B & N and others quickly jumping onto the bookseller bandwagon, he soon came to the conclusion that books, CDs and DVDs were not going to take his company to the top. He could see which way trends were headed and opted to expand into the digital market.
Digital media is great because it takes virtually no shelf space…only space on computer servers. The beauty of digital products is that they can be offered to consumers at low prices. They also have high profit value and Consumers gobble them up in high volumes. Those three things make digital products a dream option for retailers. (I nearly bought one of their Kimble mobile readers when I was in Toronto – thousands of books, etc available for download. Fortunately, I resisted temptation…for the time being.)
The key to success in most businesses is diversification and Bezos realized this. He could see the competition crowding around in the book and CD/DVD market. Amazon has been adding about two new business categories a year. The latest is Web services.
Most people have no idea just how much of the Web was powered by Amazon's Web Services division. At least they didn’t until the outage last month left lots of folks high and dry for a brief while.
Who uses Amazon's Web Services for their business' online? Big online names like Dropbox, Foursquare, Netflix, Reddit and Zynga, to name a few. Amazon now operates in most areas of the world and provides services for online companies almost everywhere.
Oh, it’s not yet financially up with the Googles, but as far as technology goes, it is a big player in online business and climbing rapidly.
Amazon has quietly expanded into Web services and has done well at reading consumer and online business needs. Other companies that Amazon owns include IMDb, the famous movie database, bargain hunter Woot!, web analyzer Alexa, audio bookseller Audible.com, and over a dozen others.
Amazon began in a 400 square foot storage room and has parlayed that into 26 million square feet of integrated, networked and communicative warehouses and server centres.
Talk about movers and shakers, eh!
See ya!
Bob
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