In the current environment, E-commerce is a less interesting space for startup founders vs. cloud SW.
This led parent commenter to assume the cloud is more important than E-commerce.
This is a fallacy, of course, since E-commerce is probably the largest / most important market on the internet, it just doesn't FEEL that way b/c Amazon has an unprecedented control over nearly the entire thing.
AWS has 40 billion in revenue, 12 billion in profit and is growing 30% YoY. It's got great profit margins, huge lock in, and is a natural monopoly. Not sure how much it would be worth on the open market, but wouldn't surprise me that it's 50%+ of Amazon's market cap.
This may seem like a silly question, but what is the point of the cloud if people don't buy goods / services over the Internet?
If ecommerce remained flat for the rest of time, do you really think the cloud would grow?
I don't really see the cloud as attached to retail. But yes, if online retail remained flat, the cloud would still grow. Because most software will be built using the cloud, for the cloud, for the foreseeable future (I'd stake confidently 50 years, probably at least 100, perhaps forever).
I'd say AWS + first-party products and services (Prime Video, Echo, Kindle, Grocery delivery). I can definitely see their pure retail business take more and more of a back seat as time goes on.
Could even see it breaking up at some point. Retail, Consumer Tech, and AWS. There's no real tie between AWS and the rest of Amazon at this point. In fact, it might be a liability as competitors of Amazon retail & Consumer tech don't want to use AWS.
I could see it breaking up at some point, when our antitrust regulators wake up to the monopoly that Amazon has become and splits the company into multiple parts.
I think the main reason AWS will breakaway will be that it'll just be so different from the rest of Amazon.
I think (for better of worse) the cloud providers - A/G/M + maybe a newcomer yet to be announced - will come to dominate computing in a way most people do not foresee.
Yes, right now they dominate the hardware provision and that will accelerate. But through that, their services will dominate software engineering, and eventually they will dominate not just IDEs and devtools (hence GitHub purchase and VS Code for MS) but they will define programming languages and even what constitutes programming.
without Andy (and AWS), I'd posit that Jeff would just be another regular old billionaire who'd own a sports team, but otherwise folks would not know much about.
I kind of agree. But without AWS, Amazon could never have become the Amazon that we know today. AWS brings in the vast majority of the profits (sometimes >100%) for Amazon, despite being a modest proportion of revenue (~10%).
This is what generates the funding necessary for Amazon to do the crazy things that make Amazon amazing. Amazon - AWS = digital Walmart. Big and profitable, but not Amazon.
Interestingly, if you go international, Amazon is either not present at all or a niche player as an online store in many countries. But in terms of cloud infrastructure they've become the universal global default / premium service. It is fascinating to me that they have beaten players like Microsoft, IBM, Oracle etc. to this status. I actually have to mount a business case in my organisation NOT to use AWS even though all the desktops and half the servers are pure Microsoft stack.
While regular consumers may not know what AWS is, Amazon's core business was able to sustain losses for 10+ years only because of profits coming from there.
Ask outside tech bubble and 9/10 never even heard of AWS,even though half of the things they use run on it. The retail front-end is the PR, while AWS is a magic money tree.
I mostly agree but I also think AWS is probably more in the public consciousness than most people would think (in the US anyway). They have TV advertisement slots with NFL for crying out loud. That said, most people probably don't actually know what it is, just that they've heard of it.
As "cloud" and "AI" become more and more accepted generic terms for technology to the public and I think AWS may even over take the PR position.
Fair point,I was commenting from European point of view,where tech companies are often invisible,apart from maybe Google or Apple with their ads plastered all over the place.I reckon an average American is more likely to tell what Oracle or AWS is just purely because of the amount of ads they've been exposed to, compared to an average European
Amazon just settled with the FTC for stealing Flex drivers’ tips. Likely that’s just the tip of the iceberg in their screwing over the people who make their products move.