Why Amazon Has No Profits and Why It Works
Check out Simon Wardley for some insight into what games Amazon may be playing, specifically on cloud. http://www.infoq.com/interviews/Cloud-Landscape-Simon-Wardle..."This is a model known as ILC, which stands for innovate leverage commoditize. The model is pretty simple: what you do is you provide a commodity service, you enable everybody else to innovate on top of it. They are actually your research and development group. You do not bother to do it yourself, you get everybody else to build on your services. Anything which is successful and starts to spread in your ecosystem, you can identify through consumption information, so you can leverage the ecosystem to spot successful development and then you commoditize these new components."