Amazon the Services Operating Ecosystem
First it was the Mechanical Turk and the Elastic Computing Cloud. People didn’t pay much attention. Then Mr.Bezos introduced the S3 (Simple Storage Service). It was one of the best services to come around in quite some time for the startup community. It was (and still is) the cheapest storage solution available with absolutely zero upfront costs. Check out this conversation between Arrington and Bezos. Om Malik also reported that how the startups were adopting this service.
Amazon also launched Alexa, which has become the defacto service for measuring web ranking and traffic analysis. I dont think I have to mention the popularity Alexa has gained since its launch. Now on August 2nd, Amazon added a new service to its quiver, the Amazon FPS (Flexible Payment Service).
Continuing its commitment to Web Services, Amazon has launched this service primarily for developers. This is a very flexible offering, which will allow developers of any eCommerce web entities to creatively offer various payment options. Frankly PayPal is getting old and slow. With PayPal there are many hard set rules, which do not offer developers much control. In addition using this service allows developers to leverage the 69+ Million Amazon users who have immediate payment access by simply using their credentials.
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Frankly with this offering Amazon has clearly established itself as the “Services Operating Ecosystem”. Their offerings clearly have become a boon for any new startup. The math simply makes sense for any start-up choosing to utilize Amazon’s services. I don’t think their ploy is to compete with PayPal. Instead it is to encourage external services to utilize its offerings.
In addition to its current platter, I would love to see Amazon offer some of the following services:
- Media or Content Management services
- Offering rock solid meta-data and URL management service
- Offering digital rights storage
- Media / Content transcoding services
- This will be very important when users want to take their content to various external services and devices, which demand alternate formats
- Universal Authentication Service
- Yeah I know it sounds like Microsoft Passport
- However I think Amazon can really do it right. Ofcourse the 69+ Million users would already be a part of this.
- Mobile Delivery Services
Finally I do wish Amazon good luck with this new service and wish they can bring some of the aforementioned services to the market. This is very valuable as it makes things cheaper for startups and ofcourse passes the savings to the consumer.
