These are the slides from the talk I gave at Amazon's All Hands meeting on May 20, 2003. I'm uploading it now because I'm referencing it in my forthcoming book, WTF: What's the Future and Why It's Up To Us, due from Harper Business in October 2017, and want people to be able to take a look at it. This is of historical interest only.

1. Amazon.com and
the Next Generation of
Computing
Tim O'Reilly
www.oreilly.com
May 20, 2003

2. What We Do At O'Reilly
• Books
• Conferences

3. What We Do At O'Reilly
• Online Publishing

4. What We Really Do
• "Big Hairy Audacious Goal": Changing
the world by capturing the knowledge of
innovators
• That is: Find interesting people and
technologies and amplify their
effectiveness by spreading the information
needed for others to follow them.
• Keep finding new, transformative
technologies that we can catalyze.

5. Watching the "Alpha Geeks"
"The future is here, it's just
not evenly distributed yet."
-William Gibson

6. Watching Amazon
• 1997: A friend tells me she's
buying a computer to use
Amazon. That was the original
definition of a "killer app."
• But people were still thinking of
the web browser as the
application, and so they didn't
think of Amazon and its peers as
applications.

7. Paradigm Shift: A Change in World
View That Calls Everything You
Know Into Question

8. Killer Apps of the Internet

9. Not Just Software: "Infoware"
• Editorial content as part of the
user interface
• Users help to build the product
• The product changes every day
• The Internet, not the PC, is the
platform

10. Software as Service
Von Kempelen's Mechanical Turk

11. A History Lesson
• Lotus 1-2-3 and WordPerfect, the killer
apps of the personal computer era, are
displaced by Microsoft Excel and
Word
• Netscape Navigator, the killer app of
the first Internet era, is displaced by
Microsoft Internet Explorer
• A platform strategy beats an
application strategy every time!

12. Technology Evolution
• Hackers push the envelope.
• Entrepreneurs make things easier for ordinary
users.
• Dominant players integrate into a platform,
raising barriers to entry. Progress stagnates, as
hackers and entrepreneurs move on, looking
for new frontiers.
Or (sometimes)
• The industry builds a healthy ecosystem, in
which hackers, entrepreneurs and platform
players play a creative game of "leapfrog". No
one gets complete lock in, and everyone has to
improve in order to stay competitive.

13. AmaBooks

15. Amazon Web Services
• An explosion of creativity as
Amazon opens its data for reuse
by others.
• A business model that creates a
virtuous circle of increasing sales.
• Amazon becomes even more
definitively the source for product
information and ecommerce.

16. Web Services Demos
• Rob Frederick
• Jeff Barr

17. Coming Soon: Proof that
Amazon is Now a
Technology Platform

18. Two Types of Platform
• One Ring to Rule Them All
• Small Pieces Loosely Joined

19. Small Pieces Loosely Joined
• An architecture of participation means that your
users help to extend your platform.
• Low barriers to experimentation mean that the
system is "hacker friendly" for maximum
innovation.
• Interoperability means that one component or
service can be swapped out if a better one comes
along.
• "Lock-in" comes because others depend on the
benefit from your services, not because you're
completely in control.

20. Questions?
• Need not just be about the talk
• For more information:
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