Jeff Bezos of Amazon.com hopped up to the Web 2.0 Expo stage to pitch Amazon's new web services: SQS (Simple Queue Service), Mechanical Turk, S3 (Simple Storage Service), and EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud).
Here's their basic pitch: These services intend to provide the building blocks of many other businesses. Bezos estimated that 70% of back-end work is undistinguishable from the back end of any other business, and so while building your own back end can be an obstacle to overcome, it doesn't add value. Most people want to go as quickly as possible from an idea to a successful product, but there's a lot of heavy lifting in between.
Amazon positions that these 'loosely coupled' services prevent peak demands from impacting service. As an example, the fully-launched Amazon S3 service had 921 milllion requests on its peak day to date, and 16,600 requests during its peak second. On the other hand, EC2 is still capacity constrained, so it's invite-only.
What does this foray into developer service imply about Amazon's strategic plan? Despite Tim O'Reilly's most charming efforts, Bezos remained tight-lipped about new product ideas and the mild controversy around Alexaholic. Bezos' one revealing comment was that "the question isn't just what is going to change over the next 10 years, it's also what isn't going to change." Given Amazon's core competency in supply chain logistics, connecting the Web 2.0 supply chain is probably one example - the physical movement of goods is another important business that isn't going away.
