The Killer App for Web Services
After watching Amazon’s amazing presentation at the Dev.Conf., it hit me that Amazon.com is the killer app for web services. Not only are they technically cool, but they have two business models for themselves and their associates built right in:
- I can build a business on their back-end data, selling targeted stuff to my customers, using their services to do all the hard stuff on the back end
- I can use their front-end to sell my own products
Amazon has turned the infrastructure on which they build their own business into a major revenue generator for not only themselves, but for associates. And, if they wanted to take it further, Amazon could provide all of their payment, distribution and storing/querying data as web services for things that weren’t even available for sale on Amazon.com, e.g. medical supplies or porn, removing the need to build all of these services yourself. In fact, they’re already planning on doing this for payment services.
*That’s* what web services are supposed to enable. *Wow*.