This strikes me as being somewhat similar to the historic relationship between auto makers and dealers. Before dealer protection laws (that we now hate so much), an auto maker could really just put any dealer out of business once the dealer had shown that there was a viable market in that area.
It's a few years later and now we have several businesses who's business model is essentially reselling amazon services (s3), and once they've shown it's a viable business (dropbox) we can expect amazon to come in and undercut them.
There are two factors that might prevent amazon from being too successful in the consumer storage area.
1. Dropbox's UI, apps, and filesystem integration are both very well designed and pretty technically complex. It might seem trivial to design something as good, but I promise you it's not.
2. Consumer storage pricing is in a race to the bottom, but consumer storage volume is increasing exponentially. Once people start uploading all their home videos to this service, will amazon be able to afford to run this business unit?
It's a few years later and now we have several businesses who's business model is essentially reselling amazon services (s3), and once they've shown it's a viable business (dropbox) we can expect amazon to come in and undercut them.
There are two factors that might prevent amazon from being too successful in the consumer storage area.
1. Dropbox's UI, apps, and filesystem integration are both very well designed and pretty technically complex. It might seem trivial to design something as good, but I promise you it's not.
2. Consumer storage pricing is in a race to the bottom, but consumer storage volume is increasing exponentially. Once people start uploading all their home videos to this service, will amazon be able to afford to run this business unit?