TechStop » Amazon

Amazon – Strikes at iPad mini

Joshua Wood — Mon, 29 Oct 2012 23:19:48 +0000

Hi all, if competition for the tablet space wasn’t already heated Amazon started to take swings today at the tablet leader on their homepage. Their homepage sported a matrix comparison of the two products with an excerpt from a review by Gizmodo. The quote from Gizmodo ended with “… cramming a worse screen in there, charging more and accusing others of compromise? Ballsy.”. The link on the matrix takes you to the Amazon fire HD purchase section even if you click on the picture of the iPad mini. Let the games … continue.

Until next time,
TechStop (JW)

Is Jeff Bezos the Next Steve Jobs?

Joshua Wood — Sun, 29 Jul 2012 20:12:05 +0000

Forbes seems to think so. Amazon’s Bezos is not afraid to take a risk or a loss today for gains in the future.

It’s paid off.

While Amazon used to be the place to go for books, it has become a massive and trusted online marketplace and portal for pretty much everything… new and used.

Regarding Bezos, Forbes states that ten years ago, “he was roundly mocked for having a business that supposedly could never show a profit, and yet it was because of those investments that Amazon survived the dotcom busts and became the most profitable online retailer.” Full Forbes Article

I know that when my wife or I plan to order something – a cable, kitchen appliance, birthday gift or a book, the first place we head is Amazon. While what we order may ultimately come from another supplier, we’ve used Amazon Marketplace and, in the end, often don’t even know the name of the actual shipper. Amazon is the name we know and trust.

What will Bezos envision next? I don’t think we were ever able to predict Jobs’s next move. If Jeff Bezos can dream like Steve Jobs did, then he’s definitely a man to watch on the tech front.

Until next time,
TechStop (JW)

Amazon’s Cloud Outage

Joshua Wood — Wed, 27 Apr 2011 02:05:07 +0000

Hi all, so Amazon had an outage in their EC2 cloud. The sites and services affected included Quora and Reddit and many many other sites and services. At this point in time people feel like IT shouldn’t have outages. Business managers look at their IT departments like they are power or water services and wonder why after investing almost nothing into them they fail. Thus the “cloud” is a great way to offload the cost and responsibility of management.

While the cloud is a great idea the evolution of it is ongoing, just like IT as a whole. Occasionally there are power outages and water shortages even in the most well-managed of cities in North America and the cloud will have down times as well. Basically, while I would still advise a UPS power bumps I wouldn’t only use a generator for power and those basics apply to the cloud as well.

Until next time,
TechStop