Free Beer and Amazon Web Services running at a loss

I'm on the not so high speed rail link from Dublin to Cork watching my 3G modem flap like a pair of unwashed oversized Y-Fronts hanging from a flag pole during a hurricane.

Yet another image you're free to take to the grave with you.

Onto new business.

Len Devanna is promising people free beer at EMC World. Well that's not what he's promising but you get the idea.

Unlike a lot of other events where the industry Legends In Their Own Living Rooms pretend they're too busy to hang out with you (Translation: They're out sucking up to the hand full of vendors who'll give them the time of day), that's not going to happen here. Here's a link to the sign up sheet. (The password is community) All you need to do is show up with a sense of humour, see who manages to get away from the mania involved in keeping EMC World running and we'll see where it goes from there.

Now for some old business.

I mentioned AWS doing $100M in revenue in 2007 and then did some digging. Since Amazon have moved well beyond the utilisation of excess capacity phase it looks like they're operating S3/EC2 at a substantial loss. Which explains why Google have taken so long to offer anything even remotely similar as currently without ad money there's no money.

With the economy being what it is one wonders for how much longer Amazon will continue to happily subsidize every user of their AWS offerings? Their capacity is as finite as everyone else's so eventually there will have to be another big infrastructure spend cycle where Amazon have to decide if they're going to go deeper into the hole or not.

It'll be interesting to see which way they jump.

Comments

[Pete Steege]

I'm a believer in the Cloud model - Amazon's just got to figure out the best info-product and business model to store on all those terabytes.

Google has nailed the Cloud concept with a Library model. I "check out" my data when I need directions to a hip restaurant or a photo of a green-lipped mussel. Meanwhile, Google's bookshelves keep expanding. Very profitably, I might add.

That's what happens when you start by selling books...everything looks like a book store.

[John Bergin]

The cloud model is a winner. After you pointed out PiWorx a few days ago I have been putting it through its paces.
If bandwidth were infinite this would be THE solution. As it is with limited connectivity on my remote client it is still a much better solution than going over the VPN and then using Remote Desktop to hop on the machine to search email.
PiWorx's integration with Outlook is significant enough for me to be a believer utilizing just that small subset of features.
I am hoping for some more advanced encryption/collaboration tools to be added into PiWorx to make it my core tool.

[Storagezilla]

Pete: I'm all for the cloud. The difference between Amazon and Google though is apps. Google have moved up the value chain by building their own apps and selling ads in place of charging a subscription fee.

Right now the value add comes from Web Developers not Amazon themselves. It'll be decision time at Amazon quite soon. Are they going to release apps and compete against their own developer customers?

John: Glad you like it. But remember it's still a Beta. The offering will evolve, and expand.

[John Bergin]

Understood that this is the beta. Loving the product now. If we could add in some of the IRM products that we are pushing it would become a great platform to distribute and share team data.

Have you tried the "chat support" option?

[Storagezilla]

Haven't tried it yet though I did just install the update.

Thoughts?

[John Bergin]

I had a quick email conversation with them hoping to get better guidance in regards to where the progress bar was.

I found one nasty problem - it won't do open file backups so you can't truly share on the fly. You need to close out excel, upload the file, and then share it.