Amazon.com offers Data Storage
Tulsa World, a news site for news about the Oklahoma city, published an article this morning entitled Books, CDs, IT Services? in which it mentions the transformation of Amazon.com from being just an online bookstore to becoming a giant in selling Media online and now it’s newest venture of selling data services to small businesses. Amazon.com hopes to be the one-stop shop for IT Services for small business retailers. The article continues to mention a few early adopters of the new service.
I found the article to be interesting in finding that Amazon.com is trying to move into the territory of Google, Go Daddy, and Web Hosts that cater to small businesses. The services they offer are not new, except that now a small retailer could essentially house everything in one place. With Amazon hosting data in addition to creating store fronts for small businesses, this could lead to a new wave of purchasing software, media, and ebooks over the web. We’ve seen a few companies attempt to venture into the electronic procurement industry by providing consumers with immediate downloads of Games, E-books, and Media. To date the only successful player has been iTunes. Could Amazon and it’s mighty marketing arm with millions of visitors to it’s pages create the first online storefront to deliver a copy of MS Office over the web? Would this be the end of buying software in local computer retail shops like Best Buy, Circuit City, etc?
Quite frankly, I’ve excited. Anytime that I can get a Service or piece of Software immediately following the purchase I’m overjoyed. For most people, they don’t forecast their need of a piece of software. Sometimes they are working on a project at 1am and realize that Photoshop might be a better way to modify that image or they need a copy of Powerpoint to finish that presentation by 8am the next morning. Well, in the case of Amazon.com, they are giving the retailers a mechanism to develop an on-demand storefront so we’ll have to just stay tuned for the retailers to make use of the technology.