05 November 2006

Jeff Bezos' New New Thing - the Old Old Thing

Business Week gets uncharacteristically breathless about Jeff Bezos' amazing, risky, unheard, innovative, super-duper bet:

Bezos wants Amazon to run your business, at least the messy technical and logistical parts of it, using those same technologies and operations that power his $10 billion online store. In the process, Bezos aims to transform Amazon into a kind of 21st century digital utility.

Wow, Jeff, that's so totally, insanely, amazingly, utterly, far-outly, er, identical to an idea that IBM had four years ago:

IBM is laying down a $10 billion wager that business technology of the not-too-distant future will center on what it calls "computing on demand."

Maybe you and the Business Week team should go and take a nice long cold shower. Not together, you understand.

4 comments:

  1. Anonymous4:37 pm

    yes but Amazon is actually executing on On Demand tooling. IBM on the other hand - On Demand was about services.

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  2. Anonymous4:38 pm

    what matters is not ideas but implementation. Amazon is actually implementing.

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  3. I'm afraid I've not come across the phrase "on-demand tooling", and even the Great Googleness knows of only 34 instances: could you explain at little, please?

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  4. Re-reading the BW piece, I notice it talks about analogue aspects of business as well as the digital side: is that what you mean?

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