Since its first steps beyond the business of books, Amazon has never made a secret of its ambitions. From private-label electronics and accessories to a marketplace for providers of Human Intelligence Tasks, Amazon has walked a fuzzy line between serving its own agenda and being an integral part of most e-commerce marketing plans. (Even if their own vendors would sometimes prefer it wasn’t so.)
Today brings two new examples of Amazon’s far-reaching ambitions. At AllThingsD, Jason Del Rey reports on Amazon’s next private-label offering: supermarket goods. Extrapolating from recently posted Amazon job ads, including “Senior Product Manager, Consumables Private Label,” AllThingsD posits that we can soon expect to see an Amazon-branded line of grocery, health, personal care, or baby products.
A visit to any grocery store will provide ample evidence that this is not a new approach; however, for an online retail giant well known for making their suppliers cut their own prices just about to the bone, it’s surely sending ripples through vendors who thought they were finishing up their 2014 marketing and distribution plans.
And at ReadWrite, Matt Asay estimates the future worth of Amazon’s cloud business, laying out his reasons for believing that the company’s cloud computing arm could be worth $50 billion by 2015. Citing the application of the company’s philosophy of thin margins and high market share to the cloud computing sector, Asay makes the case that Amazon will be an even more major player than it already is. Also helping them: their developer-heavy focus is reshaping the way cloud computing works, changing the paradigm of services to something easier to use by the people most reliant on it.
