Amazon

Amazon

Nickole Kucharski

XBIS/219

December, 11th 2011

Angelina Shelton

Amazon

What began as Earth's biggest bookstore has become Earth's biggest everything store. Expansion has propelled Amazon.com in innumerable directions. While the website still offers millions of books, movies, games, and music, electronics and other general merchandise categories, including apparel and accessories, auto parts, home furnishings, health and beauty aids, toys, and groceries ring up more than 50% of sales. Shoppers can also download e-books, games, MP3s, and films to their computers or handheld devices, including Amazon's own portable e-reader, the Kindle. Amazon also offers products and services, such as self-publishing, online advertising, e-commerce platform, hosting, and a co-branded credit card.

According to the text, Amazon uses only 10 percent of its processing capacity at any one time. I do believe that Amazon is losing focus of their initial strategy, since Amazon started out as an online bookstore. However, I don’t necessarily think this is a negative tactic. Since Amazon has the open capacity they are providing a series of computing, storage, and other services that make its infrastructure available to companies and individuals to help them run the technical and logistical parts of their businesses. Although the website is not focused on the retail aspect of the business, they are still making profit through alternate methods. By doing this, the company is targeting a different type of consumer, which in result may mean the loss of some retail customers. If they are focusing less on retail sales such as selling books, video games, other electrics and an assortment of other goods, than they must focus on their alternate sales of computing and storage.

Some of the components Amazon provides include Simple Storage Service (S3), the Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), and the Mechanical Turk. These components are used in different ways. With S3, Amazon charges 15...