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?

  • thisdesignup@alien.topBEnglish
    1·
    10 months ago

    AWS was created on accident in many ways. They built out their infrastructure internally to support hot times of year, like Christmas, etc.

    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.

    • UltraChilly@alien.topBEnglish
      1·
      10 months ago

      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.

      • PuzzleheadedCap168@alien.topBEnglish
        1·
        10 months ago

        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.