Ahead in the cloud

PROFILEAMAZON

IS THERE anything Amazon can’t flog? When the online retailing giant took its first uncertain steps on to the web, in the summer of 1995, it sold only books, and not very many of them. Today it sells everything from petrol lawnmowers to penis- enlargement pills (in the contraception corner, weirdly). It also offers food, cosmetics, jewellery, clothes, electronics, power tools, industrial music, industrial wall tubing, speedboats – products that hundreds of millions of people spend billions of dollars on each year.

Recently Amazon has had its head in the clouds. The reason emerged this week when it unveiled its latest plan to change the way we consume. Its new Cloud Drive is an online service allowing subscribers to store music on Amazon’s web servers rather than on their own computers; they can then access their files on an Android smart phone or computer from anywhere in the world with internet access.

The Cloud Drive, available only in the US for now, gives customers five gigabytes of free storage – enough for about 90 hours of music – and can be upgraded to 20GB with the purchase of digital downloads via the Amazon website.

Once installed, the software automatically pulls all your music from wherever it sits on your computer and places it on the company’s servers for your listening pleasure.

Amazon has beaten its rivals Apple and Google to the punch. Its Cloud Player should benefit from first-to-market advantage while publicly stating the company’s intention to reposition itself as an entertainment destination as opposed to just another, albeit huge, online retailer.

It is hoping its cloud has a silver (or gold) lining and will be a game-changer. It wouldn’t be the first time Amazon changed the game. It has been a relentless and powerful force for changing the way we consume since it was set up in a garage (all the best web companies start in a garage) by Jeff Bezos in Seattle in 1995. He borrowed $300,000 for what he hoped would be “Earth’s biggest book store”.

The first book he sold was the soporific-sounding Fluid Concepts and Creative Analogies: Computer Models of the Fundamental Mechanisms of Thought. But from such weighty tomes grow wildly successful companies; 16 years later Amazon has more than 100 million customers. Earlier this year analysts projected its revenue would jump by 200 per cent to about $100 billion by 2015.

For the first three years Amazon sold nothing but books, with a small staff of book lovers writing earnest reviews of the products they sold. Then, legend has it, Bezos got an e-mail from a customer that changed the company’s course dramatically. The sender of the message, thrilled skinny by the ease with which he had found an obscure book on the site, e-mailed Bezos to suggest he launch a similar online service for CDs.

Months later Amazon was the web’s biggest music retailer. It is a reflection of the dotcom madness that gripped the US in the late 1990s that it took just four years for Bezos to go from penniless entrepreneur in a cold and wet garage in Seattle to Time magazine’s billionaire “person of the year”.

While the Amazon curve has been mostly upward, it hasn’t been all plain sailing. In 2009 it was forced to apologise after thousands of Twitter users voiced concerns about its decision to remove from its rankings and from some search results selected gay and lesbian books, including serious non-fiction, academic works and novels. It later blamed a “ham-fisted” cataloguing error for the problem.

Then last year it got into more hot water. In a move worthy of Big Brother it dipped into the Kindle e-readers of some customers in the dead of night and remotely deleted recently purchased digital editions of two books. Amazon said the books had been added to its store by a company that did not have rights to them. It was unfortunate that the two books the company decided to erase from reader's machines, if not their memories, were George Orwell's Animal Farmand Nineteen Eighty-four.

In 2003 a former employee, James Marcus, wrote a book about the company called Amazonia: Five Years at the Epicenter of the Dot.Com Juggernaut. He eloquently described "the MBAs, the bean counters and the PR operatives" who joined after the company's initial public offering, in 1997. The first thing they did, he said, was to push aside worthy book reviews to make space for racier products, such as lingerie and, er, kitchen appliances.

Marcus wrote witheringly about the way Amazon dropped its much-loved in-house, independent book reviews in favour of readers’ reviews, which were frequently written by friends of the author or, if they were particularly shameless, the authors themselves.

Personalisation software became the norm,tracking users’ interests and modifying pages to reflect those interests so as to increase sales. Then there is the Kindle, the e-book reader that is doing, albeit more gradually, to the humble book what the MP3 player did to the CD.

“The question is, can you improve upon something as highly evolved and well-suited to its task as the book? And if so, how?” Bezos asked in 2007. In the months after its launch it took the US by storm and, with its wireless access to thousands of (relatively) low-cost downloadable books and newspapers, Bezos claimed it was well equipped to see off “the last bastion of analog”. Last year e-books outsold hardback books on the site for the first time.

Amazon is now getting into apps. It will launch an app store for Android phones within weeks, and it plans to compete with Google for a slice of the increasingly lucrative app pie. But this week Bezos is hoping Amazon can secure a beachhead with Cloud Drive, giving it an edge over other players in the market and allowing the biggest bookshop on earth to become even bigger.

Curriculum vitae

What is it?A shop. A huge shop. But not only that: now it's an entertainment destination in its own right. Like Dr Quirky's Good Time Emporium. Kind of.

Why is it in the news?Amazon has just unveiled its Cloud Drive, which will allow users to store days' worth of music remotely on its servers.

Good newsAmazon is cheaper than the bricks-and-mortar shops in our towns and less hassle to get to. Storing our tunes on its servers means we can access them wherever we go.

Bad newsIf we only ever shop on Amazon our bricks-and-mortar shops will close, jobs will be lost, and our towns and cities will turn into urban wastelands where wild dogs will roam. If the company's servers crash they may take our tunes with them.

Do sayOh I just love Amazon. It meets all my entertainment needs and is so competitively priced.

Don't sayPenis enlargement pills? Seriously, what are you people? A bunch of snake-oil salesmen?