Amazon’s stock this last week crossed $300 (from $2 in 1997 when it went public, after splits) and the valuation reached $140B, twice that of Facebook, but lower than Google and Apple. This is indeed amazing.
Amazon started out as a web-based book selling company. Now it has three businesses:
Selling new books as well as users can sell their old books.
Using its fulfillment engine to sell every other consumer goods.
The Amazon Web Services platform for offering cloud based services.
The last item is growing to become its number one business soon. It started monetizing its huge computing infrastructure few years back, first with renting storage (S3). Then came the Elastic Computing Cloud followed by myriad other cloud services. The AWS platform is the dominant cloud infrastructure, both IaaS and PaaS. It has been innovating new technologies such as REST, Dynamo, etc.