The Economist on Amazon’s strategy:

WHAT kind of company is Amazon.com? It is usually described as an internet retailer. But it has fingers in many other pies, too. (…) When Mr Bezos talks about these services his firm no longer sounds like a retailer at all.
(…)

There is A9, its search engine, and Unbox, a video-download service. It operates online stores for other firms, such as Target. It was a pioneer in developing “collaborative filtering” software to make recommendations to shoppers. And last week Jeff Bezos, Amazon’s boss, was out stumping for three of its “utility computing” offerings: Simple Storage Service (S3), which provides cheap access to online storage; Elastic Compute Cloud, which lets programmers rent computing capacity on Amazon’s systems; and Mechanical Turk, which connects firms with people who perform small tasks that are difficult to
automate. (…) In order to cope with the Christmas rush, Amazon has far more computing capacity than it needs for most of the year. As much as 90% of it is idle at times. Renting out pieces of that network to other businesses, such as SmugMug, an online photo site that uses the S3 service, is a way to get extra return

Amazon’s strategy seems to move from a retailer to a technology and logistics firm. What’s the underlying ideas behind that?

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