Investment Firm Expects AWS Will Hit $20 Billion In Revenues By 2020 • Hacker News Board

Re: Investment Firm Expects AWS Will Hit $20 Billion In Revenues By 2020

#21

Post by sgpl » Mon, Apr 15, 2013, 9:12 AM UTC

venomsnake wrote: post #16

sgpl wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> There's plenty of time for those competitors to catch up to AWS by 2020. Very true, but this fails to take into account that Amazon will not stay stagnant till 2020 for competitors to catch up. Because Amazon already have a healthy majority of the users/marketshare, they are perhaps better positioned to understand and innovate upon the future needs of these customers, and keep building their product offerings by a…

Having majority of the marketshare in the marketplace is hardly the best breeding ground for innovation. That is when companies usually stagnate and entrench themselves.

I agree with you assessment, but as long as Jeff Bezos is able and leading the company, I am willing to bet on Amazon's dominance in it's core markets.

Re: Investment Firm Expects AWS Will Hit $20 Billion In Revenues By 2020

#22

Post by cmdkeen » Mon, Apr 15, 2013, 12:03 PM UTC

lostlogin wrote: post #19

NewAccnt wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Since the writing of this post, AMZN has gone up ~150%.

The relationship between share price and Amazon financial results has always been a mystery to me. As are Apples.

Amazon's is based on an assumption that one day it will start to take profits, and big ones at that. Expanding into a service sector where it could have large profit margins (selling eBooks is another area) is integral to that.

Re: Investment Firm Expects AWS Will Hit $20 Billion In Revenues By 2020

#23

Post by cmdkeen » Mon, Apr 15, 2013, 12:06 PM UTC

epoxyhockey wrote: post #3

Predicting tech more than 2-3 years out is like predicting the weather 10 days out.

But they're not predicting a single piece of tech, they're predicting the success of a platform, which is really Amazon's commitment and engineering capability. You can't predict what features AWS will have in 2-3 years, but you can predict that they'll take a large chunk of the hosting business and how much that is worth. Bezos is committed to this, they have the head start and the engineering chops (or they can buy them in) so I'd say it is a fairly good bet.

Re: Investment Firm Expects AWS Will Hit $20 Billion In Revenues By 2020

#24

Post by ShaneOG » Mon, Apr 15, 2013, 1:52 PM UTC

dyno12345 wrote: post #9

epoxyhockey wrote: post #3

Predicting tech more than 2-3 years out is like predicting the weather 10 days out.

Predicting the weather is easier than that... weather is cyclical.

Not in my part of the world! (Ireland)

Usually I bring sunglasses and an umbrella with me each morning, just in case.

Re: Investment Firm Expects AWS Will Hit $20 Billion In Revenues By 2020

#25

Post by codex » Mon, Apr 15, 2013, 5:22 PM UTC

One flaw with AWS-like businesses is lack of lock-in because of customer churn.

Web site popularity on the Internet obeys a power law distribution--the top sites take the lion's share of traffic and money from the Internet.

AWS will never see revenue from the post popular sites, because once a site grows past a certain size, it's cheaper to build redudancy and host themselves (Netflix, Facebook, etc.). AWS is actually fairly expensive for handling a large stream of traffic--it's only for intermittent use or cash-poor sites that the economics makes sense.

So AWS is full of very small to medium size operations, which are constantly popping in and out of existence. And when a small site pops into existence, it has no legacy cloud APIs to support, and can go with whatever cloud provider has the best offering at that time.