Amazon Revolution

One of the largest online retailers, if not the largest, is Amazon. Amazon realized that they were only using 10% of their processing capacity. Because of this, its competition from sites such as overstock.com, and their sales less than Wal-Mart’s, Amazon found an IT solution. They offered to assist in running the logistical and technical areas of businesses for individuals and companies in 2007. The infrastructure included Mechanical Turk, Simple Storage Service (S3), and Elastic Computer Cloud (EC2). For only 15 cents per gigabyte a business can use S3 as a storage mechanism. For only 10 cents per hour, Amazon’s EC2 will let companies and people lease power for the equivalent of one basic server. Mechanical Turk is a service Amazon offers in which people look for inappropriate images and content. They also transcribe audio. Companies post their work on Mechanical Turk. Amazon receives a 10% commission off Mechanical Turk (Rainer, Jr., & Turban, 2009).

Amazon is not moving away from its core expertise of remaining the leading online retailer; they are just adding new products and services to become more competitive. With the three new systems, Mechanical Turk, Simple Storage Service, and Elastic Computer Cloud Amazon is competing with Google and Microsoft in “building a Web-based, global computing platform” (Rainer, Jr., & Turban, 2009, p. 27). By offering these services, Amazon is ahead of its game. They have everything in one place for convenience. A comparison would be Super Wal-Mart where people have the convenience of one-stop shopping even if they need groceries and tires.

Where Amazon offers the Simple Storage Service, in 2003, Google came up with the Google File System, which is “a scalable distributed file system for large distributed data-intensive applications. It provides fault tolerance while running on inexpensive commodity hardware, and it delivers high aggregate performance to a large number of clients” (Ghemawat, Gobioff, & Leung, 2003, p. 1)....