Amazon’s Jeff Bezos Looks to the Future
Before long, “user-generated content” won’t refer only to media, but to just about anything: user-generated jeans, user-generated sports cars, user-generated breakfast meats.
This is because setting up a company that designs, makes and globally sells physical products could become almost as easy as starting a blog — and the repercussions would be earthshaking.
That’s the future Amazon.com CEO Jeff Bezos hopes to set in motion with the company’s new direction. If you tease out Bezos’ plan, you get to a point where a high school cheerleader sitting at home with a laptop could theoretically harness computing power, design capabilities, manufacturing and distribution from around the world, and make and market a cute little pink hot rod that would compete against General Motors.
Just what GM’s board wants to hear about now, huh?
“You’re going to be able to have virtual start-ups, virtual entrepreneurship,” says Marc Benioff, CEO of Salesforce.com, which is betting on a vision similar to Amazon’s. “It will be the next wave.”
A couple of weeks ago, at the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco, Bezos unveiled his strategy and talked with me about it. In the near term, the whole thing seems pretty complicated and nerdy. Amazon will offer services with names such as Elastic Compute Cloud (renting out computing capacity), Simple Storage Service (renting data storage) and Mechanical Turk (I’m still not sure what that is!).
“I haven’t figured out a way to explain this very well yet,” Bezos told me with his trademark big grin. “I was hoping you would.”
If you put the pieces together, Amazon is essentially renting everything it does to anyone who wants it, from big corporations to some guy in a yurt in Mongolia. Well, as long as the yurt has high-speed Internet.
You can rent space on Amazon’s computers to run a business, or rent out its…
