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Jeff Bezos: AWS Will Break $10 Billion This Year (windowsitpro.com)
v3rgEz writes: Jeff Bezos is bullish on the cloud, pegging AWS' sales for this year at $10 billion in a recent letter to shareholders. But he said there was a surprising source of that success: The company's willingness to fail. That said, with AWS now spanning 70 different services, Amazon can afford to fail some as long as few, like EC2 and S3, keep winning. Bezos wrote: "One area where I think we are especially distinctive is failure. I believe we are the best place in the world to fail (we have plenty of practice!), and failure and invention are inseparable twins. To invent you have to experiment, and if you know in advance that it's going to work, it's not an experiment. Most large organizations embrace the idea of invention, but are not willing to suffer the string of failed experiments necessary to get there."
That should be "a few".
A seemingly minor omission but it almost reverses the meaning.
At the bottom of the
I wonder if the AWS business will actually lead Amazon to make a profit, I've read so much about how they never make a profit in the news, I seriously wonder if this could be the tipping point (product).
Perhaps what we are talking about here is TAXABLE profit? Amazon, among others, have been in the news for not paying any tax due to what can best be described as trickery. Legal, but not morally right - in the sense that if you benefit (eg. as in making money) from a nation or other group of entities, then it is right that you pay for it to that nation/group of entities. Actually, this is a basic principle in business; there wouldn't be any business, if only one side profited from the relationship.
There is a lot of pressure on their pricing, especially the storage side. Google is cheaper and Nearline is much faster (3 seconds) than Amazon's Glacier product (1 hour). Microsoft are fairly competitive too, and the integration with Visual Studio and .NET makes their platform quite attractive to many people.
Could be a while before they make any money. It's a new, rapidly developing market and they have some big competitors.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Amazon has generally not being paying much tax because it reinvests much if not all of it's profits back into the business to grow it. Nothing even morally wrong about reinvesting "profits" back into the business and thus not paying tax on them. Governments in general even encourage this behaviour.
What is odd about Amazon is that they have been doing this now for 20 years.
Perhaps what we are talking about here is TAXABLE profit? Amazon, among others, have been in the news for not paying any tax due to what can best be described as trickery.
Amazon doesn't pay a lot of tax primarily because they don't make a lot of profit. While they definitely do some of the same shenanigans other multi-nationals engage in (and shame on them for that), Amazon doesn't do as much of it because they don't need to. They only get taxed on their profits which have been generally scant. They generate a lot of revenue but their margins aren't huge and they re-invest much of that into the company or in building products to get bigger and their primary business (online sales) isn't a fat margin business to begin with.
Unlike companies like Apple which generate huge profits but then route it through countries with low tax obligations or other overly clever schemes, Amazon just generates minimal profits by actually investing in their business. As such they don't pay a lot of tax mostly for a reason I can actually get behind - building their business. Believe me I'm hugely against companies that dodge taxes through financial engineering but I think as a general proposition there are better companies to target tax dodging rage against at the moment than Amazon.
It wouldn't surprise me if in time AWS turned into the real profit center for Amazon. I think the same thought has occurred to Amazon management
So you find it to be 'trickery' to reinvest all profits to build more products, services, investment opportunities, even bloody jobs as opposed to using them to buy larger yachts? Interesting definition of 'trickery'.
You can't handle the truth.