When Will AWS Move Up the Stack to Real Applications?
As a shareholder, hopefully never. Building infrastructure and platforms has three wonderful benefits:<p>* Good customers, where good is defined as smart and willing to spend money. Going up the stack means dealing making sacrifices on both of those dimensions.<p>* Less complex products that stay relevant longer. Amazon builds legos and leaves the task of putting them together to others. The assembly can create value, but also adds complexity that becomes difficult to manage over time. S3 was launched in 2006 (!) and I&#x27;d bet will outlast high-order products like Box and Dropbox.<p>* Scale. Building apps means targeting smaller sets of customers. At Amazon&#x27;s size, it&#x27;s not clear what kind of application software would be a better use of their resources than simply continuing to solve platform problems.