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).
“Retail” is just the part of commerce that’s somewhat moved online today. “E-commerce” is any type of commerce moving online.
I really struggle to think of reasons as to why people will pay for software if it doesn’t ultimately lead to commerce.
EDIT: For context, BABA used it e-commerce lead in China to become the largest gateway for utility bill-pay. Very much not retail, but still e-commerce. The internet is a tool run by humans to serve humans, & if humans aren’t transacting using the internet, everything else about the internet is inherently less valuable.
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.