When Will AWS Move Up the Stack to Real Applications?
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When Will AWS Move Up the Stack to Real Applications?
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Re: When Will AWS Move Up the Stack to Real Applications?
#2Haven't they already started with Chime?
EDIT: Looks like this article was written Feb 3rd, and Chime was announced 10 days later.
Re: When Will AWS Move Up the Stack to Real Applications?
#3Haven't they already started with Chime? https://chime.aws/ EDIT: Looks like this article was written Feb 3rd, and Chime was announced 10 days later.
And before that, they had WorkDoc and WorkMail. I think the line can be hard to draw: is RDS application? What about RedShift? Quicksight? Echo?
Re: When Will AWS Move Up the Stack to Real Applications?
#4Haven't they already started with Chime? https://chime.aws/ EDIT: Looks like this article was written Feb 3rd, and Chime was announced 10 days later.
And AWS Connect. Certainly the are headed up the food chain.
Re: When Will AWS Move Up the Stack to Real Applications?
#5As a shareholder, hopefully never. Building infrastructure and platforms has three wonderful benefits:
* Good customers, where good is defined as smart and willing to spend money. Going up the stack means dealing making sacrifices on both of those dimensions.
* Less complex products that stay relevant longer. Amazon builds legos and leaves the task of putting them together to others. The assembly can create value, but also adds complexity that becomes difficult to manage over time. S3 was launched in 2006 (!) and I'd bet will outlast high-order products like Box and Dropbox.
* Scale. Building apps means targeting smaller sets of customers. At Amazon's size, it's not clear what kind of application software would be a better use of their resources than simply continuing to solve platform problems.
Re: When Will AWS Move Up the Stack to Real Applications?
#6I'm guessing they won't move very far up the stack for the time being. It seems to me that once a process is able to be software-itized at least two things happen. One it comes under that old adage that any computing program/application can be done for half the resources/time every 18 months. The second is that producer surplus (profit) that emerges from an information asymmetry becomes consumer surplus when that asymmetry is able to be defined in software. All supply side economies of scale seem to be disappearing and what we're left with are companies that have a monopoly on some raw input or a demand side economy of scale (network effect).
Re: When Will AWS Move Up the Stack to Real Applications?
#7I think Amazon QuickSight is probably a good example of the types of "real" applications they'll be launching more of in the future.
Services slightly further up the stack that reinforce the value of their infrastructure services. For example, I could see them launching a competitor to ESP/Marketing automation services (reinforcing AWS SES).
Re: When Will AWS Move Up the Stack to Real Applications?
#8Why would they want to? Levi Strauss didn't get rich prospecting. Let Amazon sell the jeans and pick axes (both digitally and physically in their case) to the modern day prospectors.
Re: When Will AWS Move Up the Stack to Real Applications?
#9I think - somewhat controversially - that business/productivity apps will make or break AWS. Assuming Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure can reach AWS feature parity and prices, most everyone will likely move their infra to where their apps are.
Two (of many) reasons:
1) Biz/productivity apps are better when they connect directly to your infrastructure (eg query and viz features between Google Sheets + BigQuery, etc), and
2) Infrastructure is better when already integrated into your biz apps (eg Google Analytics auto push to BigQuery, etc).
More here: https://twitter.com/pavtalk/status/822539127568658436
Re: When Will AWS Move Up the Stack to Real Applications?
#10> "It would be interesting to see Amazon actually start producing algorithms and application software on behalf of customers, moving itself even further up the stack and deeper into IT departments."
Sounds more like consulting than Amazon's current business model. Is consulting really all that great a business, as compared to what Amazon is currently doing? Writing personalised software offers extremely low customers:engineering-effort ratios, as compared to infrastructure level services which are more one-size-fits-all. I'm sure Amazon will make AWS more and more high level, in an effort to attract customers who want high level solutions as opposed to low level solutions. But I can't imagine Amazon going full throttle into the consulting business.