Amazon's Cloud Computing Will Put Its Retail Business in the Shade

Amazon (AMZN) on Monday announced persistent storage for its EC2 service, and what’s notable is how quickly the e-tailer is running ahead of the competition. In fact, Amazon’s real business down the line will be its cloud services. Amazon will be like a book store that sells cocaine out the back door. Books will be just a front to sell storage and cloud computing.

Everyone else–Google (GOOG) and Microsoft (MSFT)–are working on their cloud computing services, but they are really in the first revision of their respective offerings. Amazon is ahead and tweaking (Techmeme).

That’s where the latest storage move is just the beginning. Amazon is offering 99.9 percent reliability and as it works toward its enterprise plans, that could increase.

In its blog, Amazon says that it is going to be more transparent about its roadmap. What’s notable to me is that Amazon even has a roadmap. It’s quite possible that Amazon’s real business becomes the cloud, with e-tailing as a mere cover.

Comments

[The short Amazonian]

There isn't much difference between clouds and smoke in this case. Cloud computing isn't new and isn't special. Every company of any size has a road map (AKA enterprise architecture).

[tessant]

i think cloud computing could be huge in the future, but it is never explained fully, so no one knows what they are talking about

scott
marketbar

[Football Geek]

Very interesting subject. MSFT is scrambling to get a foothold in this
area. This is one reason for the yahoo deal. Besides the big players ...
IBM, MSFT, GOOGLE, AMZN .... what other companies would be
winners in this business?

[birdman]

Google has released a pretty intriguing beta ( code.google.com/appengine /). Notice the generous limits for the free service. Also, there platform is a more natural move for developers as it has Python support and support for relational storage (Amazon's S3 is simply key, value, and not relational). It's true that cloud services will be a much larger business than books in the long run, but I'm not sure Amazon's first mover advantage is going to be enough to keep the likes of Google and Microsoft at bay. Particularly given the global datacenter infrastructure Microsoft and Google have already built out. As cloud services becomes a commoditized market, MS and GOOG will have significant competitive advantages in the ability to spent capital on global datacenters.