You’re transported back to 1994 with all your current knowledge and $50,000. Your goal is to create the world’s biggest online shopping company.
How do you go about it?
As a further thought experiment, if you travelled back to 1960 with all your current knowledge and the goal of becoming the richest person on earth, what businesses would you start?
How would you use the 50k to raise the millions needed just to get that started?
That’s actually a really good point.
Bezos was brilliant in that he identified a market that was real cheap to break into, and his goal was to expand it from there.
Use the mail system and sell cheap stuff people don’t really want to go to the store for.
Most people interested in books don’t really care if they’re going to Borders or Barnes and Noble, cause they hear of a good book from friends or internet reviews. Books are cheap, and readers just want to buy one that other people with similar interests recommend.
However, he originally intended to stick with retail-type or grocery-type business I personally think.
AWS was created on accident in many ways. They built out their infrastructure internally to support hot times of year, like Christmas, etc.
But then it’s all wasted most the year. So someone had a brilliant idea to sell access to that surplus hardware capacity off-season.
Thus the cloud was born.
I don’t think it was Andy Jassy exclusively responsible for that idea, more likely it came from a few folks at once. Bezos is also credited. But that’s why Mr. Jassy is Amazon CEO today.
Now imagine going back knowing this. What if you could create a service where you sell your own server hosting services too them. Stop AWS from ever happening. Can’t compete if that side of their business doesn’t exist. Can’t guarantee that they’d actually buy from you but… still it’s an interesting thought. You know ahead of time that all these business will need that service. So start selling it to them.
I think there were already server hosting services back then, and the lack of offer is not the reason why they went with their own.
Yeah I think it might be a scale issue.
Like you need lots of servers in lots of locations. One consistent interface.
Also I suppose the Amazon software engineers built tools for themselves and probably re-used some of it in the cloud products.
If I recall the very first offering was S3 and EC2 where you’d just get yourself on-demand storage and virtual machines.
Then they built out all this other stuff on top, like Lambda. They’ve been adding services ever since.