Utility Hosting

It was a bit of a revlation when I realised recently, that you could buy a virtual internet host.

Amazon, have probably the most innovative products:

Elastic Compute Cloud

This service hosts your virtual machine, i.e. you create an image of a Linux system and upload it to Amazon. Your system gets an IP address and runs in Amazon's data centre. It's still in beta and quite pricey, but it gives you lots of possibilities.


Simple Storage Service

This service stores your virtual machine and any other data - it's unbelievably cheap, and you can also make use of bittorrent technology to distribute stored content.


Amazon also offers a service with which you can use Amazon's e-commerce payment features, which is nice because people will probably trust Amazon more than a smalltime e-commerce site. However I am not sure how their commisions stack up against PayPal and Google.

These services are shrewd moves on Amazon's part. They recognise that their core competency is information technology over everything else, and that's what I am sure they'll increasingly focus on.

What's the betting that Amazon sell nothing themselves in 10 years, but focus on providing the technology for others to sell online? (a la EBay)