Read/WriteWeb’s Web 2.0 Summit coverage sponsored by Yahoo!
Day 2 at the Web 2.0 Summit and Jeff Bezos is on stage, talking about S3 and
EC2. He says “we’re a small company with big ideas”, but they’ve been
surprised at the level of interest in these services. He thinks people are
excited because they can see a future where you can go from idea to
implementation very quickly – and that it’s very empowering. So Amazon is taking
care of the ‘heavy lifting’, which they call “muck”. He notes that
it’s a continuous loop. He says 70% of energy and dollars in web app development
by people is in this heavy lifting, so Amazon wants to solve that. He ends with:
“we make muck, so you don’t have to”.
Now Tim is asking questions to Jeff – he starts off by asking why
Microsoft isn’t in this business (they are a customer of Amazon in these
services). Or Google. Why a retailer? Jeff says they’ve been doing this for 11
years – operating a web-scale business. He says they have to be very efficient
at Amazon.com, so they’ve always operated their infrastructure like that. Tim
asks why though? Jeff responds that they’ve been working on these services for
several years now. His definition of web 2.0 is computers talking to computers –
which is a lot of what we’re seeing with web services. So Jeff says they’re
doing this because they’re good at it, they know how to do it and they think
it’s a great business.