HALF MOON BAY, Calif.--At the Fortune Brainstorm 2008 conference here on Monday, David Kirkpatrick asked Jeff Bezos about the origins of Amazon.com's Web Services. "We were building these services for ourselves," Bezos said, when Amazon came up with the idea to "harden the interfaces" between interdependent services. Bezos said the idea was to make interaction between services "coarse-grained instead of fine-grained." Loosening the links between services allowed individual groups to innovate and change without fear of breaking the rest of the Amazon infrastructure.
Jeff Bezos, rocket man.
(Credit: Rafe Needleman / CNET)This concept, Bezos said in response to a question from Kirkpatrick about his space exploration company Blue Origin, does not apply to rockets. "It's harder to get APIs" for rockets, Bezos joked, before getting more serious. You change one variable, and everything else changes. Change your propellant, then you have to change engines, which changes the center of gravity, which takes you back to the drawing board. Bezos said this kind of tight integration is necessary because so many components of a space vehicle are operating at the very edge of their performance. The corollary, of course, is that most Web services are not.
Still, obviously, the "hardened" design of Amazon Web Services is not a panacea. Many of the AWS products went offline Sunday. From the audience, Howard Morgan of First Round Capital opened the topic of regulation for this market, considering how important Web services are becoming to businesses. Morgan compared the Web services market with the regulated electricity market, a comparison Bezos made several times during his talk with Kirkpatrick. But Bezos said that power utilities were regulated since it didn't make sense to run multiple power lines in a city. Web services need to compete on reliability, he said. Perhaps he should put his rocket engineers on the case.
See the rest of our conference coverage here.
HALF MOON BAY, Calif.--At Monday's kickoff discussion at the high-zoot (it's at the Ritz Carlton) Fortune Brainstorm 2008 conference, moderator David Kirkpatrick asks the question, "Is tech making the world a better place?"
Two speakers, Michael Dell and Mark Benioff of Salesforce.com, focused on the changes in business: the Net gives companies a communications conduit with customers. "We put big ears on," Dell said, referring in part to the Digg-like Ideastorm system that Dell is using to gather customer feedback.
Fortune's big thinkers, left to right: David Kirkpatrick, Michael Dell, Gary Hamel, Mark Benioff, Christiane Zu Salm,
(Credit: Rafe Needleman/CNET)Benioff said, with a smile, "Our customers are ganging up on us," and, he said, "our product managers have less to do. The Internet is the great accelerator."
Author Gary Hamel pointed out the flip side of these changes: "The great scandal of management," he said, is that, "most workers are disengaged. The Internet is great at harnessing customers' imaginations more than employees."
Focusing on society more than business, Hamel also said on the panel that the Net is, "empowering people to create like never before in human history. We are emancipating human imagination."
The final panelist, investor Christiane Zu Salm, focused on societal changes: "Technology will change more our society than our business."
I believe the takeaway from this first panel is much about the conflict between old-style management and the power-leveling effect of the Internet. Conceptually, user-generated content services like YouTube, user-edited newstreams like Digg, and user-powered customer support initiatives like Get Satisfaction put customers in charge. As Hamel said, "It's going to make a lot of traditional executives very uncomfortable."
I believe it is already.
See the rest of our conference coverage here.
- prev
- 1
- next
