IBM's real software competition: eBay and Amazon.com

David Longworth makes the argument in Web services without warranties. By rolling out Web services that people actually want, i.e., the ability to quickly buy books and, um, stuff, the two companies are positioning themselves to rule the roost of Web services in the future, he argues:

Using platforms such as Amazon Web Services or Sforce from Salesforce.com, developers will not only build out their existing applications to make use of new functionality available on the Web, they'll also be developing new applications from scratch.

And this even though these services have no SLAs:

Some enterprises may be tempted to batten down the hatches and forbid all contact with such services. But such a gesture would be as futile today as it was to forbid the deployment of PCs in the 1980s. For all their shortcomings, PCs delivered competitive advantage that could not be ignored. Early adopters believe the same is true of today's on-demand web services - despite the absence of performance guarantees that makes reliance on such services a risky proposition in mission-critical applications

Rips in the Web 2.0 fabric - Loosely Coupled weblog, Oct 5th 2004 11:23am Of note, he continues, is that 20% of Amazon's revenue now comes from selling stuff for other retailers - which is helping to drive its dominance in Web-services innovation. Back to Compendium