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In 1997, the year Amazon.com went public, its chief executive, Jeff Bezos, issued a manifesto: “It’s all about the long term,” he said. He warned shareholders “we may make decisions and weigh tradeoffs differently than some companies” and urged them to make sure that a long-term approach “is consistent with your investment policy.” Amazon’s management and employees “are working to build something important, something that matters to our customers, something that we can tell our grandchildren about,” he added.
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I wouldn’t be surprised if a version of Dropbox that plays nicely with the Cloud Drive is one of the first Cloud Drive apps on the scene. It makes a great deal of sense. Instead of paying Dropbox for storage and syncing, we could just pay them for syncing.
It seems rather unlikely to me that people would pay dropbox for their syncing service to store things on someone else's paid storage. I would think that the dropbox software exists to drive people to their relatively high margin de-duplicated cloud storage subscriptions.
In a similar fashion it seems likely to me that Cloud Drive exists to drive adoption & volume to Amazon digital music, a market that dwarfs the size of the online storage game.
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Somebody should create a simple little app on top of S3 that runs on all your devices and creates an automatically synced folder. They should make it free for the first couple GB too.
Then Cloud Drive would seem kind of lame.
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If you’re an entrepreneur itching to get into e-commerce, remember that you can’t compete on geography (unless you’re cloning an existing retailer in a region where there is no Amazon), and you can’t compete purely on price. But here’s what you can do:
Cultivate a better shopping experience: BlueNile is simply a better place to shop for engagement rings. Zappos is a better place to shop for shoes. In some cases, what makes Amazon.com great (every shopping experience is the same) is also its greatest weakness. Some things are designed to be bought differently.
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Build a marketplace for buyers and sellers, don’t be a reseller. Etsy, eBay, IronPlanet, Copart, Elance and others have built great value by focusing on the defensible art of the network effect. This area is far from played out, and there are many marketplaces waiting to be created for verticals from babysitting to piano lessons. The best marketplaces tend to be for frequently purchased items with a diverse quantity of sellers and few repeated interactions. For example, you want to eat at different restaurants, but typically go to the same piano teacher for years, so it’s easy to see why OpenTable might be bigger than a piano lesson marketplace.
Further, the design of Amazon's database is remarkably like the internal data structures of modern programming languages. Very much like a hash or a dictionary (what Perl and Python call these structures) or Frontier's tables, but unlike them, you can have multiple values with the same name. In this way it's like XML. I imagine all languages have had to accomodate this feature of XML (we did in Frontier), so they should all map pretty well on Amazon's structure. This was gutsy, and I think smart. Permalink to this paragraph
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A Manila server would work fine for a few thousand sites, but after that it would bog down because the architecture couldn't escape the confines of a single machine it was designed for in the 80s. (Before you say it's obsolete, there still are a lot of apps for single machines. Perl, Python, JavaScript and Java share the same design philosophy.)
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