Amazon's Software Emerges As Valuable Product

Amazon has pretty much got it right!
The perennial question re. Web Services has how does one define Web Services in simple terms. My response has always been:

The ability to interact with a Web Point of Presence without visual navigation. A good example being the ability to send the "amazon.com" site a message in order to order a book instead of physically navigating to the site.

This has been my definition since 2001 long before Amazon implemented it's Web Services APIs.

In recent times I came a cross this post in the general blogsphere at Ecademy(sheer coincedence I might add. I wasn't looking for it, but that's what this emerging semantic web experience is all about):

I thought I'd kick off that old chestnut - "What is a web service?" - again with the definition according to the W3C. They should know ... shouldn't they ...

A Web service is a software system identified by a URI, whose public interfaces and bindings are defined and described using XML. Its definition can be discovered by other software systems. These systems may then interact with the Web service in a manner prescribed by its definition, using XML based messages conveyed by Internet protocols.

http://www.w3.org/TR/2002/WD-ws-arch-20021114/#whatisws

Accurate, but kind of obscure for the none technical reader.

Sofware companies always seek to reach the land of critical mass (this is the single destination of every software vendor), and critical mass implies the creation of an ecosystem served by the software vendor (Microsoft is king of critical mass and this is the secret of their success!).

Amazon as an eCommerce pioneer has pretty much figure this out (their patent pounding sometime compromises this reality, I certainly don't like this part of their behavior), and they have correctly used Web Services as the vehicle.

Google has pretty much figured this out too, and before Amazon I might add.

Amazon's Software Emerges As Valuable Product I'm surprised that it's taken people this long to realize that the most valuable part of Amazon.com's business might not be their stores, but their ability to run stores for others. Amazon.com still has, by far, some of the best technology out there for running an e-commerce site. In the early days of e-commerce, any good online shopping innovation was quickly copied, but more recently it seems that no one has been able to keep up with Amazon's advancements. It's not clear if this is due to Amazon's patent-crazy nature, or if most others have simply given up the fight. Either way, Amazon is doing their best to capitalize on their technology lead, and it seems that there's no shortage of willing customers. [via Techdirt]

I don't quite understand what eBay is waiting for, especially as the visual web is in decline as we move towards an executable webin which the brand is only as good as the critical massgenerated Web Services consumers, and not the eyeballscollated from home page hits.

See this futuristic piece (How Google beat Amazon and eBay to the Semantic Web)that sheds some speculative light on how this could play out.