Amazon, the Walmart of Digital Selling, Is into Smart Software Too
March 3, 2017
Big day. Amazon, the company that reports its financials in a remarkably weird way, is now explaining that it is a player in the smart software poker game. Navigate to “Welcome to the New AWS AI Blog!” Now the DWs (digital Walmarters) are explaining that artificial intelligence, was, is, and will be the future of the mall killer.
How many AI and smart software services does the Main Street shopping pillager offer. Check out this chart:
There are “engines.” One can pay money to use this devices. Some of the names are semi familiar like TensorFlow; others may be unfamiliar to the shopping crowd; for instance, CNTK. Love that acronym.
There are complete platforms. Some of these are open sourcey, but when vendor lock in is one of the possible consequences of the cloud approach to software, one never knows, does one? I like Amazon machine learning and “EMR”, an acronym which means a variant of Google’s old school batch processing thing. Yikes! Batch processing in a zip zip world of real time flows.
The third layer is Amazon AI services. I noted the inclusion of Lex, Amazon’s home companion. Alexa, what’s the weather?
The idea is that Amazon is every bit as robust as some of the other smart software outfits. No less an authority than Mark Cuban is pressed into duty as an objective supporter of Amazon’s freshly repackaged collection of oddments.
The blog, I assume, will explain how those in search of smart software can order up machine learning along with an order of dog food.
Who should be nervous about Amazon’s repackaging of its industry leading cloud services? I would suggest that cross town pal Microsoft might be checking out Amazon’s AI chart. Then, of course, there are the wizards at Hewlett Packard Enterprise. I wonder of Amazon’s services will be of use to HPE when it meets up with Autonomy in court later this year. And the number one outfit likely to be consulting tea leaves for hints of Amazon’s AI impact? Good old IBM. Fresh from another quarter of declining revenues and more IBM Watson hyperbole, IBM might be wondering, “How did a digital Walmart get from used CDs to AI?”
And the Google? My hunch is that the Google may note Amazon’s blog. But the company is in the ad business, has been, and probably will be for the foreseeable future. Amazon is too diversified to the Google to see many parallels.
My hunch is that Amazon does see search as vulnerable. Another Main Street? Perhaps?
Stephen E Arnold, March 3, 2017
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