

Amazon's core competency? Pricing. - mwsherman
http://clipperhouse.com/blog/post/Amazons-core-competency-Pricing.aspx

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ryanelkins
I don't really see what the point of this article was - the entire message is
summed up in one phrase "Amazon has mastered ... making money in low-margin
businesses."

There is really no additional analysis, explanation, or extrapolation beyond
that statement. The key thing that inspired this was that Amazon "introduced
spot pricing for servers" which is never actually explained for anyone that
might not know what that even means.

I think there was a seed of a good article here, but it should really be more
than just stating an idea and leaving everything else up to the reader to
determine.

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mwsherman
Added a bit of explanation of spot pricing, per your request.

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zepolen
Yes, _that's_ why I use their (slightly overpriced) services.

It couldn't possibly be the features, reliability, ease of us, awesome
documentation and almost instant availability.

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MikeCapone
You are paying for all those things. If they are better at all of those than
the competition, I'm not sure if they are overpriced.

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Specstacular
To demonstrate that spot pricing is a CORE competency you would need to show
that it is applied ACROSS their businesses. Where's the evidence they use it
much in books sales, music etc?

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Tamerlin
"Of course their technical and operational execution is excellent"

Clearly spoken by someone who has only seen the beast from the outside...

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coderdude
As a customer of s3 looking to use ec2, can you elaborate?

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Tamerlin
ec2 is one part of amazon that I haven't any direct experience with, but
anyone who thinks that amazon is a good technology company should spend some
time chatting with the legion of ex-amazon employees out there.

