Services Amazon are not very common in Russia due to the fact that the company is simply not represented on our market. However, this is not a reason to ignore its products: surprisingly, it is more profitable to buy many goods at Amazon, and not in Russian stores, even despite the nuances of shipping purchases from the USA.
At the same time Amazon is not just a convenient platform for online shopping; with each new product, Jeff Bezos's brainchild looks more and more like a huge IT corporation like Google or Apple. Today I will tell you why you should perceive Amazon as the main contender for the title of the world's main innovator in the world of information technology.
Offline stores of the future
In December last year, a supermarket Amazon Go was launched in test mode. The main difference from ordinary stores is that customers simply go inside, take the goods they need from the shelves and leave, bypassing the checkout counters, fiddling with bag storage cameras, and so on. It sounds fantastic, but such a concept is quite feasible – hundreds of artificially controlled cameras and sensors provide the convenience of buyers. I already wrote about the first Amazon Go, so if you are interested, you can read a more detailed story about the 'store of the future'.
Warehouses on airships
More than half of Americans regularly shop at Amazon. I think there is no need to explain how huge the company's turnover is. For example, in the pre-Christmas period (from November to the end of December 2016), customers Amazon purchased over a billion products. Therefore, the management Amazon is increasingly looking for new ideas for storing products. So, last year, the company patented a system consisting of huge airships hanging at a height of 13 kilometers.
Upon receipt of the order, special drones will send it to the ground, and after delivery is completed, they will be collected by another larger flying shuttle to return back to the airship. The project clearly sounds very futuristic, but it was developed with an eye to the future. Until then, Amazon has more realistic options …
Delivery drones and more
We live in the 21st century, and founder Jeff Bezos understands this better than anyone else. The company has been testing the possibility of delivery using quadcopters for several years already, and last December Amazon began sending orders by drones across the territory of Cambridge in a trial mode.
Equally ambitious, albeit rather unusual, is the concept of sending goods … underground. Just a month ago, the corporation received a patent for the construction of an underground system of drones that move either on rails, or via pneumatic mail, or along conveyor belts. In any case, even airship warehouses seem more realistic compared to this venture.
AWS Snowmobile
But the idea of transferring large amounts of data not over the Internet, but on physically transported servers, no longer looks utopian. To be more precise, in the fall of 2016 Amazon AWS Snowmobile was presented – an infrastructure that provides Amazon Prime users with space in the cloud for a fee, and it is planned to transport the servers themselves using large trucks, because indeed, When it comes to tens of petabytes, it will be faster to physically move a server with data than to transfer such impressive amounts of information over the Internet, no matter how fast it is.
Existing projects
No less important – both for the Amazon itself and for the entire IT industry – are the service Amazon Prime, quite popular among Americans, and the virtual assistant Alexa.
Amazon Prime is the buyer's premium account. For $ 99 a year, you get free and very fast delivery (goods will be delivered anywhere in the US in 1-2 days), discounts on many of the company's products and access to branded services Amazon Prime Video and Amazon Prime Music.
Alexa is the virtual assistant 'living' in the Amazon Echo column. Something similar was recently released by the “Corporation of Good” with its Google Home, but Alexa is more tied to services Amazon, although at the same time it is also able to search the necessary information on the Internet, play music and control various thermostats, lights, entrance doors. and other elements of a smart home.
Eventually
Do you think Amazon will be able to push giants like Apple and Google out of the IT market? Personally, it seems to me that such an option is quite possible, but only in the USA – simply because even in Europe services Amazon are not as widespread as in America. What can we say about Russia and other Russian-speaking countries …