Amazon: The King of Computing?
Posted on | February 5, 2010 | 1 Comment
It’s one of those funny little situations we find ourselves in where we start to see some clues of Amazon’s long reaches into computing. We mainly see Amazon now as a retail-like store selling everything from books to DVDs to microwave egg cookers. But if you look under the hood, you also see they are relatively strong in selling cloud-based comuting spaces to anyone who’s tired of havng to constantly upgrade their hardware. A lot of companies have taken advantage of the cloud-computing services that Amazon now provides. Jeff Bezos made a great decision to offer these services. After all, they had all this massive hardware for tracking all of their sales; why not use it for cloud-computing services? Makes sense. Now with the Kindle, they also have a nice little niche area where they have gained a loyal following due to the simplicity of the device. It reminds me of the original blackberry messaging devices which weren’t good for anything-else, but was super efficient at messaging.
So, with all of that in mind, one can extrapolate quite a bit, as far as the imagination will take you. What if the Kindle out performs the Apple iPad and becomes a household item used for everything from reading books to controlling the TV to buying stuff over the internet (gee, I wonder what site they would go to for that?)? Then imagine Amazon coming up with their own operating system similar in functionality to Google’s Chrome OS. Preposterous you say? Well, why not? 10 years ago, no-one would have imagined that Amazon was going to sell their own manufactured device (Kindle) or even have a cloud-based computing service.
In the future, we could have internet appliances that run Kindle OS 7.3 that provides an instant-on access to the inernet. 10 years from now, people could be asking, why were Google and Microsoft, and even Apple so ignorant about Amazon? While they were fighting amongst themselves, Amazon blew right past them and conqured the computing field? Bill Gates and Steve Jobs will both be retired by then and Steve Ballmer will be under pressure to resign from Microsoft for having failed to understand the bigger picture. He just couldn’t competently compete with other, smarter companies. He just didn’t get it. He needs to understand why he’s the laughing stock of YouTube videos.
Does all of this sound crazy? Just a wild speculative banter? Well, perhaps. But consider this: Apple computers was just a computer company in 2000. Then they launched the iPod in 2001 and a few other things that slowly moved them away from Computers and more into home appliance-type equipment (e.g., iPhone, Apple TV, etc.). So, why can’t Amazon do the same? But they don’t have Steve Jobs you say? Well, he’s certainly the main reason why Apple is what it is today, but there’s certainly capable people at Amazon as well. When Jeff Bezos came up with the name “Amazon,” he may have had something-else in mind than just the size of a large bookstore. He may have been thinking of an amazonian-sized computer company capable of dominating the industry. Don’t laugh. It’s possible! One of these days, I’ll say, “I told you so.” That’s right, you heard it here first.
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February 10th, 2010 @ 7:21 pm
Yeah, I think Jeff Bezos is smarter than Steve Jobs.