Of course, Amazon extracts a stiff price for allowing third-party vendors to sell its products.

Amazon does not seem to murder websites and businesses. That's a big plus for businesses who have to deal with the vagaries of Google's sledgehammer imprecisions masquerading as tweaks to its algorithms. Those people don't care how many businesses and jobs they destroy. If Amazon facilitates the creation of jobs through its shopping platform then that is a good thing. I'm sure that even an ardent fan of Google such as yourself would acknowledge that the facilitation of the creation of jobs by Amazon's shopping platform is a good thing.

Regards...jmcc

The Party Is Over for Amazon

Really.

Amazon provide a superb service for customers. We order hard-to-find products today, they arrive tomorrow, at the right price.

Google provide a superb service for their shareholders. They create nothing, sell nothing tangible, make their money from information they have taken from others, often illegally.

If one of them goes bust I know which one will be missed the most.

Amazon does not seem to murder websites and businesses.

I'm sure there are many brick-and-mortar businesses that would disagree. (Granted, nobody ever guaranteed them a living, just as nobody ever guaranteed a living to SEO-driven online businesses.)

I'm sure that even an ardent fan of Google such as yourself would acknowledge that the facilitation of the creation of jobs by Amazon's shopping platform is a good thing.

I'm not an "ardent fan of Google," but I'm rational enough to separate fact from fantasy. As for the creation of jobs by Amazon's shopping platform, some jobs have been created and others have been killed (which you could also say about personal computers, search engines, digital photography, computer typography, "big box" stores, and any number of other disruptive technologies and business trends).

You also might want to do some research into the kinds of jobs that Amazon has created. Many (most?) of those jobs involve grueling low-tech work by seasonal employees (often retirees who desperately need the low wages). As one economics professor put it, "Even though the typical layperson on the street thinks Amazon belongs to the same group as Google, Facebook and Twitter, it’s more like Walmart without the bricks and mortar."

[time.com...]

Although Amazon seems to be eating some of Google's lunch, it's important to remember that many verticals that are hugely profitable for Google don't fit the Amazon model.

E.G. Services (which is incredibly varied, from plumbers to B2B specialist services that cost millions)

I know that other companies compete with Google in some service verticals, and some are the go-to resource in their sector, but Google is still seen by most people as the starting point for service searches. Additionally, if I offer high value services then I want my company to be seen for many information-based searches in that niche - that's hugely valuable to Google as they are the beneficiaries of that.

Products (and some services that fit the Amazon model) are undoubtedly a huge part of the economy and I'd be very interested in knowing the percentage (over the years) of ad revenue that Google sees from them. However, every business and every person uses services - and a good proportion of product costs are there as a direct result of the cost of running (even a lean) business.

Which brings us onto Amazon Web Services... that's an interesting one! Amazon is out to steal the dessert from Google before they even have it. When you see the clamour for Saas, Paas, IaaS gathering pace in big companies you know that some serious cash is awaiting the victor. Amazon is much more than a big shop.

Which brings us onto Amazon Web Services... that's an interesting one! Amazon is out to steal the dessert from Google before they even have it. When you see the clamour for Saas, Paas, IaaS gathering pace in big companies you know that some serious cash is awaiting the victor. Amazon is much more than a big shop.

Google has about 1.4 million websites on its IP ranges. Amazon really has nailed the Cloud market and is a far more impressive and well used service. Microsoft is also competing for that market. Google is quite late to the market and its efforts look rather paltry by comparison.

What is interesting is that there has not been a shift away from shared hosting towards Cloud hosting. (I run a regular website IP mapping survey across about 170 million domain names so I don't rely on fanboy "articles" about this kind of stuff by technology churnalists.)

Regards...jmcc

Sorry this is a little off the original topic.

Website hosting is big, but I was thinking of other services that medium and large businesses pay a lot for. The amount of cloud images for enterprise software and the ever increasing pressure on IT budgets (people are expensive...) puts AWS in a very nice position. Many companies need a lot of computing power to run regular or ad-hoc reports that assist decision making or simply running their businesses, cloud services get rid of up-front costs and lower staffing requirements.

A lot of new IT graduates will end up working in quite different roles than people who graduated 10 years ago. Data Scientists and related roles are a boom area, just look at the amount of University post graduate courses on the subject.

There are other cloud providers (such as Rackspace) who do go after web hosting (and much more with private cloud infrastructure), based on their known expertise. AWS might see a migration of some web hosting from medium to large companies but I'd say that many will decide to use it as a computation resource (and handy tertiary backup) and service hosting environment - the velocity of data for some means that they might need to move more core services to the cloud (or stick with in-house and avoid the cloud - for some it will be an all-in decision).

Does slightly tie in with the idea of Google becoming a domain name registrar. I think that Godaddy closed its Cloud operation a while ago but it is very much a retail hoster.

Regards...jmcc

OK, still off topic:

Many companies need a lot of computing power to run regular or ad-hoc reports that assist decision making or simply running their businesses,

Can we start a thread on this, not too sure where? Running what we would call a medium sized business, we've looked at cloud stuff etc and, honestly, could not see the benefits nor justify their costs. Are many companies generating so much data that they can no longer absorb or understand it?

FWIW our business is mostly unlikely to ever grow into a $1+ billion company, that's simply not the nature of the business.

Can we start a thread on this ["cloud stuff"], not too sure where?

Maybe the "Professional Webmaster Business Issues" forum?

[webmasterworld.com...]

Mind you, few people will ever see the thread if the forum name doesn't include "Google." :-)

Might be a good idea, RedBar,
Cloud hosting is an interesting topic but there's a lot of cut and paste cluelessness surrouding it. A few small hosting companies latched on to it as some kind of money making operation but it is quite hardware intensive compared to fire and forget shared hosting.

Regards...jmcc

I'd be willing to bet Amazon and Google are pretty close. Bezos invested $250,000 in Google at the equivalent of $0.08 per share back in 1998.

At the current stock price that stake would be worth almost 1.7 Billion, and probably a lot more because I'm not sure how the split affected it. Could be anywhere up to 4 Billion Bezos owns in GOOG stock if he hasn't sold it.

[growthink.com...]

Competitive, probably, close, yea, I think so!