So when I first came to the United States, in 1999, the CEO of Amazon, Jeff Bezos, won Time Person of the Year award. It was a heady time, but as we all know, the dot com bubble exploded.
Amazon survived, and built a safe rep as an online superstore.
Then something happened. Perhaps it was always a plan, but Amazon started exploring new horizons, and putting out new products and services that didn't fit with the concept of a boring online bookstore.
I'll quickly mention two of these. The first is mechanical turk (article by nytimes), which is the jewel of the crowdsourcing community. Here Amazon is leveraging its online cloud infrastructure to create a market place for crowdsourcing. The second is the Kindle, where Amazon is betting on low-end personal e-readers. Here Amazon is leveraging its position as the premier online bookstore to provide the best titles.
First, I think this is interesting because it shows Amazon has ambition and wants to be a tech company that produces hardware and software and is not stuck in a niche. Secondly, its only a matter of time before Kindles get cameras, whose needs might be low power consumption and reliability. In addition, computer vision people also are using Turk for a variety of applications.
Interesting times ahead for those of us who track Amazon.
I remember being an intern in A9, and the kindle making its first appearance in our office. Exciting times!
ReplyDelete