Following on from the last post – Evolving Web Business Models – three separate news items cropped up yesterday about Amazon. Whilst so much attention gets focused on what Google, Apple, Facebook and Microsoft are doing, it seems Amazon has been one of the most successful at evolving its web business model.
The New York Times had an article – With a Kindle Hiring Spree, Amazon Gears Up for Battle With Apple. The article goes on to debate will Apple’s new iPad kill the Kindle or not.
The answer is somewhat answered in an article on TechCrunch – Kindle for Android Hits This Summer. Opening with the author commenting how one of his favourite apps for the iPad is the Kindle app and how it now looks like the Kindle app will also be available on the Android. Seems to me, Amazon is being pretty quick to leverage those APIs and get its product everyone. The Kindle is becoming less about the physical device and more about a portable mechanism for buying, reading and annotating books…
There’s the age old quote “In the pursuit of digging for gold, you want to be the business selling shovels…” Can’t remember the exact wording, or the source. It was first told to me by a business mentor… but I digress.
The final article from yesterday was from the SmoothSpan Blog – Amazon Stealing the Cloud. The blog post covers various statistics that show just how many businesses are using Amazon’s various cloud services. Amazon isn’t just leveraging APIs to support its retail business, the technology side of Amazon is providing both APIs and the platform on which to host and run them – the spades, the barn, the wheelbarrow… everything you could possibly need to go digging for gold.
Interesting times…
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