First of all, you should be listening to the Businessweek Covercast if you you are interested in business. It is one of the best major media podcasts out there as, it takes advantage of the medium by extending the cover stories with additional content. Some major media companies have decided to merely read their own printed word into a mic and call it a podcast. While I see the value in this, it is not truly exploiting the medium.
Businessweek's podcast however is not perfect. I think they could do more by opening the conversation up to their readers but, Covercast is certainly headed in the right direction.
This story was on the cover of Businessweek and all over the blogosphere so, what better reason to share it with my readers (perhaps some have not seen it already, cmon). Also, I just listened to the podcast that went along with the story and it was pretty cool.
"Bezos aims to transform Amazon into a kind of 21st century digital utility. It's as if Wal-Mart Stores Inc. (WMT ) had decided to turn itself inside out, offering its industry-leading supply chain and logistics systems to any and all outsiders, even rival retailers."
By lowering the barriers to entry even further for online retailers, I think that Bezos' move is very exciting. Furthermore, the concept of building an online platform in place of things that were once done in part on the desktop is perfectly aligned with the way the what seems to be the future of the web.
Elastic Compute Cloud (as the service is named) could either revolutionize business or be a very expensive failed experiment.
Tags: Amazon, Elastic Compute Cloud, Podcast, Bezos, Covercast, Bussinessweek