Business_219_Week_2

Individual Amazon Evolution Week 2 XBIS 219 Jacqueline S. Kelley 9 February 2013 Amazon’s original goal was to be the largest online bookseller in the United States. This concept quickly caught on for those looking for cheap books, this was extremely popular among college students. At that time, eBay was the primary way that consumers would buy goods online. This process involved a very time consuming process, and it could result in the consumer paying an outrage price for goods they wanted to purchase online. In addition to the prices the consumer would have to pay it was also very difficult for someone who was otherwise occupied, for example, if someone worked it was hard to stay on top of the deal and not lose the bid to another consumer who may not be working and had time to stay on top of the deal. EBay did try to accommodate the consumer with a website called half.com, but this site did not catch on like Amazon.  Amazon moved into other Medias, such as videos, videogames, and many other types of entertainment. Once the company realized that it was making a profit selling books and the other forms of medium their website their management team decided that he website would be able to get college students and other individuals to purchase other items once they logged on to buy the books. Amazon organized their items in a user friendly format which was very easy to locate. They also provided the option to customers which allowed them to qualify for free shipping. Amazon developed a very useful search engine that allowed the customer to go directly to the time they want and it also suggested other items that they thought the consumer might be interested in based on the items they were looking at. This is something a normal store cannot provide but can be provided by Amazon and has led to an increase in Amazon's development. There are three main components of the Amazon database they are the simple storage service known as S3, the elastic compute cloud which is also known as EC2 and the Mechanical Turk. The S3 database is used by external businesses to store their data on Amazon’s external drives. The EC2 is a cloud of storage that Amazon provides for a cost which provides processing power. The Mechanical Turk is a network of employees that work to discover and properly discard content in information and images that can be missed by machines. A large data management issue that Amazon could encounter is that many of Amazon’s servers and applications require a large amount of space and need the capacity to hold a vast amount of information required for the databases. Amazon’s management may run into space issues and could encounter errors in the storage of information. The original intent of Amazon was to obtain a competitive advantage by offering large amounts of storage for data and analytical tools for information for a price to their customers. References Rainer, R.K.Jr., & Turban E. (2009). Introduction to Information Systems: Supporting and transforming business (2nd ed.). Chapter 1. Hoboken, MJ: Wiley