When Google chairman Eric Schmidt earlier this year included Amazon in his “Gang of Four” companies that currently rule consumer technology, it seemed a little odd. Apple, Google, and Facebook all made sense—but wasn’t Amazon just a dot-com darling that sold a lot of books, sure, but hadn’t exactly set the tech world on fire in at least a decade?
How wrong we were.
The successful debut of the Kindle Fire, Amazon’s first tablet, demonstrates just what a stealthy powerhouse CEO Jeff Bezos and his team have been building these past several years. The original Kindle ereader should have probably given us a clue, not to mention Amazon’s massive cloud infrastructure and the Amazon Web Services (AWS) platform that’s quietly dominating the growing cloud marketplace.
A new infographic from the Frugal Dad blog (below) maps out some of the pillars of Amazon’s success. Here we see a company that’s not only going toe-to-toe with brick-and-mortar retail giants like Walmart, but carving out a seat for itself at the high-tech table amongst the titans of Silicon Valley.
We got another clue as to how Amazon became such a power player courtesy of an accidental post a few weeks ago by a former Amazon staffer and current Google engineer on his Google+ feed. In that epic manifesto, Steve Yegge described how Bezos, in a single draconian mandate that was enforced relentlessly, pushed Amazon’s disparate teams into conforming to a single software platform across the entire company.
That move wasn’t particularly well-liked at the time, Yegge conceded, but it’s made Amazon into perhaps the most promising engine for platform development in the industry today.
Of course, it’s not all ponies and rainbows at the top of the heap. Just as Apple’s had to deal withaccusations of worker abuse at the Chinese factories of its manufacturing partners, Amazon recentlyendured a scandal over working conditions at some of its U.S.-based warehouse.
