A potential competitor, yes, but who expected Amazon to offer a video transcoding service? I certainly did not. Do you think that offering any compute-based service using Amazon's infrastructure is a bad business decision?

If you'd asked me a few years ago, I wouldn't have expected Amazon to provide a CDN. Or a DNS server. Or a giant MySQL instance in the sky.

I think the general lesson here is that if it is a server-based operation that can be made more cost effective in bulk, Amazon are interested in doing it.

> that can be made more cost effective in bulk

I assume the Heroku guys have noticed by now. Hopefully they're working on designing Amazon out.

It is interesting that Amazon never seem to go down the acquisition route- if they did, Heroku could be a target.

I really want someone to make an RDS-like service for Postgres. But I don't blame people for not trying right now, I'm sure Amazon will do it eventually.

Are you saying Amazon would buy Salesforce, or that Amazon would buy Heroku from Salesforce?

I actually forgot that Heroku had been bought out by Salesforce- but the point remains that before they sold, Amazon could have been tried competing in any buy out.

I can't quite believe Amazon has never acquired anyone, though- are there any high profile ones out there?

eh? From the bottom of the Amazon.com homepage ...

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AbeBooks

AfterSchool.com

Audible

BeautyBar.com

Book Depository

Bookworm.com

Casa.com

CreateSpace

Diapers.com

DPReview

Fabric

IMDb

Junglee.com

MYHABIT

Shopbop

Soap.com

Vine.com

Wag.com

Woot

Yoyo.com

Zappos

Most of those look like online retailers and not iaas or compute services companies.

No one builds services like amazon. They aren't interested in bolting on someone else's idea company.

Plus defunct operations like cdnow.

Amazon bought Zappos and Kiva

Someone already did, like a year ago: http://www.enterprisedb.com/

> but who expected Amazon to offer a video transcoding service?

Anyone who has used their instant streaming service. They have a boatload of video to transcode to zillions of devices. The fact that they would take that in-house was not a particularly big leap.

I never would have guessed it before they released their Simple Workflow Service. Once I saw that, though, game on.

I'd expect anything that allows them to sell more instances without having to increase cost of sales. They have unique edge in being able to see what types of services would do well under this model, including live competitive analysis on the instances they currently run.