Business Case

Like most companies in the current economy Amazon.com is looking for ways to increase their bottom line by exploring new avenues of possible income. Amazon's strategy seems to be that of simply making money. With a growing need to pad their bottom line, Amazon is pulling away from the online retail side of their business and delving into other avenues like server rental, data storage services, and outsourcing "employees". While making these changes to their infrastructure Amazon is staying in touch with their core competency. The main goal for any company is income and profit. Amazon is not moving away from the retail side of the business but expanding what they retail. The sale of data, information, and knowledge is as much a business as selling merchandise.

In business any decision that puts money in the bank is a wise strategy as long as it is legal. Amazon's main strategy all along has been to make money so I do not see how or why the sale of data, information, and knowledge would be considered as moving away from retailing. Retailing is basically selling goods and services directly to the consumers, and this is exactly what Amazon continues to do. They are now including the sale of date, information, and knowledge directly to the consumers instead of books, games, movies, and other material objects. In order to make a large number of this data, information and knowledge available Amazon has developed the SimpleDB (Amazon Web Services LLC.). This database is a simple web-based database that allows the creation and storage of data sets, allows you to search for specific data, and get results from those searches. The ease of use of the database allows consumers to quickly locate goods and services they would want to purchase as well include their own information into the database at a per-usage fee as well. By simply adding a domain to the database consumers can use the technology without having to define or change schemas as new information