Bezos interview

DJ-S1

A clip from an Information Week interview - Jeff Bezos explains how S3 helps complanies and uses Smugmug as the example:

InformationWeek: It seems that with Amazon Web Services you're removing a lot of the barriers to entry that traditionally would have insulated businesses from competition. Companies like barriers to entry because they provide a little bit of breathing room and little bit of profit margin. What are the new barriers to entry going to be in a world where you've got all these companies operating on your undifferentiated infrastructure?

Bezos: The game should move to a higher level where the unique parts of what you do become the source of your differentiation, instead of the kind of heavy lifting, price of entry thing. What we're doing is leveling the playing field so that small companies can have access to the same low-cost structure as big companies for very reliable backend infrastructure, and to do that in a pay-by-the-drink way -- so that you don't have these big fixed-cost steps that you have to subject yourself to. But there will still be whatever it is that the individual companies is doing ... is it a photo sharing Web site? So SmugMug is a user of our services. They are a very good photo-sharing Web site. And they will create differentiation on the part of their business that really matters to their customers. Their customers don't care at the end of the day what piece of infrastructure is holding their photos, as long as it's reliable. And what SmugMug really cares about is how are they going to make their photo-sharing service better than everyone else's. It's already an excellent service and they can keep adding to it and put their energy into those things that truly differentiate it for their customers instead of just paying for the price of entry sort of things. Nobody really cares whether you're using these servers or those servers, but you have to put a lot of thought and work and energy into those things. And a lot of that energy doesn't help you compete.