Amazon and Hardware As a Service

sioux_chance writes to recommend an article up on ReadWriteWeb comparing Amazon's S3 and EC2 services with Google AdSense. (They are not the first to coin the term "HaaS" for hardware as a service.) The analogy is that Google increased the granularity of (the article invents the term "fragmentized") the revenue side of the Web business, whereas Amazon's HaaS does the same for the cost side. A comment to the blog posting points out that NearlyFreeSpeech.net has been selling fine-grained hardware capacity for years, but Amazon does bring a greater scale to the business.

Comments

the article invents the term "fragmentized"? what?

[webplay]

http://www.thefreedictionary.com/fragmentized
fragmentize (frgmn-tz)
tr. & intr.v. fragmentized, fragmentizing, fragmentizes
To break or become broken into fragments.
The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition copyright ©2000

Re:IBM introduced "Hardware as a service" around 1

[mcrbids]

There are two players in this space who are known to make money: Akamai and ResPower Render Farm.

Oh, come now. That's just silly.

When you host a website, you pay for NNN Megabytes of website, and maybe YYY GB of network transfer. These are terms of hardware, not software, not service. Yet, it's sold as a service.

Even the free Hotmail has, as one if it's key features, XX GB of space. It's a free service sold in terms of hardware consumption. Then there are backup providers, weblication providers, Yahoo stores, etc.

There aren't two, there are something like 5 million of them.

Re:they now own everything

[Tuoqui]

Parent is not flame bait possibly off topic a bit but still it is true in the point they are making. If you don't own the hardware or the software how can you honestly say the data is yours and is secure? I mean really, think about it... These are big companies, what if one of the competitors slips them a few thousand grand under the table for a peek at your customer database which is conveniently hosted on the website. Companies did this in the old days between each other to compile junk mailing lists and telemarketer calling numbers.

Business is a dirty and underhanded as the underbelly of the spy scene. There are those who are willing to get ahead by any means necessary (look at recent complaints about Target and BestBuy). These are the exact same companies that you are typically entrusting your private information such as credit cards and mailing info to on a daily basis.