I had (wrongly) assumed he was a business person first since he had most recently worked at Bankers Trust and DE Shaw. Thank you for the clarification. This explains his insights that would drive AWS.
I, on the other hand, am underwhelmed.
Their AWS services is a pretty cool tech and business.
But as for their other stuff:
1) Their core business (the store) barely makes any profit. Their profit margins are razor-thin, and until recently operated at a loss IIRC.
2) Their ebooks and music store are ho-hum.
3) Their hardwares, Kindles (Fire and plain) are simply loss leaders for content sales. Which (1) is not that profitable in itself anyway. Not that difficult to sell stuff like readers and tablets at a cost or slight loss.
Anything else I forget about?
-XML only (which is often strucured in the most obscure ways, and inconsistent through the API)
-shared reqeust throttling across all authorized applications (which turns the API from "barely useful" to "I can be lucky if I get a valid response")
-inconsistent across all marketplaces (of course I can't use the "fullfilmentLatency" attribute on the US-marketplace like in the rest of the world)
-unreliable (yeah Amazon, just ignore the list of prices I just sent you and mark them as processed, I am used to it)
That and many more things(e.g. hiding competitors in the responses) makes the API so useless that many people resort to just scraping the Amazon pages. An API that is so bad that nobody uses it is almost as bad as none at all.
I'm sorry, I didn't mean to rage but seeing that Amazon treats 3rd party developers and merchants like shit while doing everything to make the customers happy always makes my blood boil.
The choose to do this. I read an excellent article on it some months back but can't find it again, but suffice it to say there is far more to their low margins than you think.