Amazon Case Study Accounting Information System
Amazon: From Book Seller to Service Provider
1. Amazon’s strategy is to maintain its role as an online retailer while diversifying its product and service line.[1] While many people still see Amazon only as an online book retailer, this is no longer true. Amazon is now best described as a technology retailer. Capitalizing on its large and reliable Internet infrastructure, Amazon Web Services now include the following: Simple Storage Service (S3), Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), SimpleDB, CloudFront, SQS, Flexible Payment Service and Mechanical Turk.[2] These services are aimed at helping other companies to succeed. Amazon has moved away from its original core competency as an online book seller and has become a technology firm.[3] Further evidence of this is found in Amazon’s launch of the Amazon Kindle, an electronic reader developed by the Amazon.com subsidiary Lab126. This places Amazon squarely in the hardware and software development business, a further diversification of its interests.
2. Amazon is competing with Google and Microsoft because Google and Microsoft offer their customers rival computing solutions, including database management, storage, and running programs on remote servers. In short, Amazon, Google and Microsoft are all offering business solutions to companies. These solutions include Software as a Service (SaaS) and Hardware as a Service (HaaS). It is only a wise strategy for Amazon to compete with Google and Microsoft if Amazon can maintain a competitive edge as a technology firm. As an online retailer, Amazon is doing well and has recently posted strong earnings, but this is largely because of book store bankruptcies and problems at e-Bay. Amazon may be doing well in the retail market but it will have to remain innovative if it wants to stay competitive in the area of SaaS and HaaS business solutions, and to stay ahead of Google’s and Microsoft’s development of new platforms. The strategies of Google, Microsoft and Amazon are very
1. Amazon’s strategy is to maintain its role as an online retailer while diversifying its product and service line.[1] While many people still see Amazon only as an online book retailer, this is no longer true. Amazon is now best described as a technology retailer. Capitalizing on its large and reliable Internet infrastructure, Amazon Web Services now include the following: Simple Storage Service (S3), Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), SimpleDB, CloudFront, SQS, Flexible Payment Service and Mechanical Turk.[2] These services are aimed at helping other companies to succeed. Amazon has moved away from its original core competency as an online book seller and has become a technology firm.[3] Further evidence of this is found in Amazon’s launch of the Amazon Kindle, an electronic reader developed by the Amazon.com subsidiary Lab126. This places Amazon squarely in the hardware and software development business, a further diversification of its interests.
2. Amazon is competing with Google and Microsoft because Google and Microsoft offer their customers rival computing solutions, including database management, storage, and running programs on remote servers. In short, Amazon, Google and Microsoft are all offering business solutions to companies. These solutions include Software as a Service (SaaS) and Hardware as a Service (HaaS). It is only a wise strategy for Amazon to compete with Google and Microsoft if Amazon can maintain a competitive edge as a technology firm. As an online retailer, Amazon is doing well and has recently posted strong earnings, but this is largely because of book store bankruptcies and problems at e-Bay. Amazon may be doing well in the retail market but it will have to remain innovative if it wants to stay competitive in the area of SaaS and HaaS business solutions, and to stay ahead of Google’s and Microsoft’s development of new platforms. The strategies of Google, Microsoft and Amazon are very