sehr spannend, welche Neuausrichtung Jeff Bezos/Amazon plant, Business Week hat dazu einen ausführlichen Artikel verfasst, Jeff Bezos‘ Risky Bet:
Bezos wants Amazon to run your business, at least the messy technical and logistical parts of it, using those same technologies and operations that power his $10 billion online store. In the process, Bezos aims to transform Amazon into a kind of 21st century digital utility. It’s as if Wal-Mart Stores Inc. (WMT ) had decided to turn itself inside out, offering its industry-leading supply chain and logistics systems to any and all outsiders, even rival retailers. Except Amazon is starting to rent out just about everything it uses to run its own business, from rack space in its 10 million square feet of warehouses worldwide to spare computing capacity on its thousands of servers, data storage on its disk drives, and even some of the millions of lines of software code it has written to coordinate all that.
Die Wallstreet ist unruhig, aber gerade die Geschäftsentwicklung von Amazon könnte ein Grund für diese Neuausrichtung sein:
What it didn’t translate into was the consistent profit growth many investors had expected by now. Lately profits have fallen, dragged down by spending on new technology projects and on free-shipping offers that Amazon considers marketing in place of TV ads. Analysts expect full-year net income this year to come in at about $180 million, or half of last year’s total. Most worrisome to investors is Amazon’s three-year-plus binge on new technologies. So far this year its spending on technology and content, including hiring hundreds of engineers and programmers to produce all these new services and buy more servers to run them, is up 52%, to $485 million. As a result, operating margins, at 4.1% for the past four quarters, now come in at less than Wal-Mart’s 5.9%. Even Barnes & Noble Inc. (BKS ), that doughty bricks-and-mortar book chain that many expected to get remaindered by the Web, has higher margins, at 5.4%
Read Write Web zum WebOS-Ansatz:
Building large-scale web software is a big challenge. Amazon solves this problem by offering the infrastructure that has powered one of the biggest online stores for the past decade. Amazon hides complexity behind simple, minimalist APIs and offers their services for a very reasonable cost. The Amazon team takes the concepts of search, storage, lookup and management of data – and turns them into pay-per-fetch and pay-per-space web services.
Jochen Krisch, einer der deutschen E-Commerce „2.0“-Experten resumiert:
Entweder sie übernehmen als Plattformbetreiber (technische) Dienstleistungen für andere, oder sie entdecken den Verkauf als ihre neue Kernkompetenz. Amazon versucht, genau diese beiden Zukunftsfelder zu besetzen, indem es geeignete Tools und Lösungen bereitstellt.
Jeff soll angeblich diese neue Strategie auf der Web-Konferenz in San Francisco der Öffentlichkeit pärsentieren.
via Fischmarkt
