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Rivalry Building Between Amazon and Google
Amazon and Google, both giants in the online business world, started out as separate entities with two very different agendas. As each has grown into an empire, the overlapping areas of business between the two companies has grown as well. But with both companies moving strongly into the electronic device market, cloud services, and Amazon now building out its advertising network, they find themselves increasingly at odds, and 2013 may bring more direct battles."Amazon wants to be the one place where you buy everything. Google wants to be the one place where you find everything, of which buying things is a subset. So when you marry those facts I think you're going to see a natural collision," said VC partner Chi-hua Chien. Adds Reuters, "Not long after Bezos learned of Google's catalog plans, Amazon began scanning books and providing searchable digital excerpts. Its Kindle e-reader, launched a few years later, owes much of its inspiration to the catalog news, the executive said. Now, Amazon is pushing its online ad efforts, threatening to siphon revenue and users from Google's main search website."
While everyone is more interested in the rivalry of Google, Apple and Microsoft, Amazon has steadily charted up year after year building a base that is more resilient than that of any other.
Right.. Google is NEVER down
Nobody is interested in Microsoft. The "pack of four" includes *Facebook* over Microsoft.
Facebook isn't in the same league as the big boys.
Revenue for most recent quarter:
Facebook makes a lot of noise, but they're smaller than eBay, which had quarterly revenue around $4 billion, and about even with Yahoo.
Amazon is the company with room to expand. Amazon could potentially take over most of retail. Their real competitor is Wal-Mart.
The others are near the ceiling of their markets. Google has failed to make money with anything other than search ads. Microsoft probably has a long life ahead of it, like IBM, serving the needs of business. Apple has a price maintenance problem - their huge markups may not survive the flood of lower-priced devices. Facebook is in a bind; their user base has peaked, and shoving more ads at users didn't work out for Myspace.
1 Netflix does use multiple zones:
http://techblog.netflix.com/2011/04/lessons-netflix-learned-from-aws-outage.html
2 US-East-1 is the default zone, and it is the largest zone. It may even be larger than all of the others combined. It consists of more than 10 datacenters in the VA area. It is also the oldest, and it's where Amazon launches new services first.