Read/WriteWeb’s Web 2.0 Summit coverage sponsored by Yahoo!
Day 2 at the Web 2.0 Summit and Jeff Bezos is on stage, talking about S3 and EC2. He says “we’re a small company with big ideas”, but they’ve been surprised at the level of interest in these services. He thinks people are excited because they can see a future where you can go from idea to implementation very quickly – and that it’s very empowering. So Amazon is taking care of the ‘heavy lifting’, which they call “muck”. He notes that it’s a continuous loop. He says 70% of energy and dollars in web app development by people is in this heavy lifting, so Amazon wants to solve that. He ends with: “we make muck, so you don’t have to”.
Now Tim is asking questions to Jeff – he starts off by asking why Microsoft isn’t in this business (they are a customer of Amazon in these services). Or Google. Why a retailer? Jeff says they’ve been doing this for 11 years – operating a web-scale business. He says they have to be very efficient at Amazon.com, so they’ve always operated their infrastructure like that. Tim asks why though? Jeff responds that they’ve been working on these services for several years now. His definition of web 2.0 is computers talking to computers – which is a lot of what we’re seeing with web services. So Jeff says they’re doing this because they’re good at it, they know how to do it and they think it’s a great business.
Originally published on ReadWriteWeb (archived copy)