Amazon has undoubtedly transformed itself into one of the best online stores in the world. A powerful database and their user friendly approach has ensured that people who visit and shop from their website come back for more. Although, Amazon has started to diversify into other arenas, it does not deviate from its core strategy of attracting customers to its online store. As already mentioned Amazon’s aim is to revolutionize retailing and as a part of this aim they have invested around $2 billion just to ensure that they are able to provide superior shopping experience to their customers.
In order to stay competitive, Amazon has also started investing in other areas as part of their strategy. Although, online retailing is their core competency, they have moved to providing three services such as Simple Storage Service, Mechanical Turk and Elastic Compute Cloud. Amazon might be diversifying their investments but they are certainly not deviating from their core competency that is online retailing.
Google and Microsoft are the pioneers in the field of internet and therefore beating or at least staying at par with their standards is the only way to survive in the competitive era of online retailing. If Amazon wants to survive in online retailing they have to compete with these big brands; Google and Amazon. Apart from this, Amazon has also started providing their platform services well before any other competitor. Amazon Cloud Front, Amazon RDS, Amazon SQS and Amazon Simple DB are some examples of their platform services.
As is already mentioned in the case, Amazon is said to be competing with Google and Microsoft in providing platform services to their clients. However, this is now something new for the company, as Amazon has started providing platform services well before their competitors. This means that Amazon will likely be a successful contender when it comes to the platform services. Apart from this Amazon has also launched Kindle Fire, which is currently its most successful offering.
Amazon has also been able to attract thousands of companies who are currently using Amazon’s services. This is just one approach of Amazon to stay competitive in the long-run against the competitors. Surviving in the online retailing sector is hard especially when they have other big competitors such as Microsoft and Google, who are constantly innovating and coming up with newer products online.
As outlined in the text, businesses nowadays have to face technological pressures and have to come up with newer and improved technologies constantly. Therefore, it seems imperative for Amazon to innovate continuously to survive in this globally competitive market. It is not necessarily deviating from its own strategies but merely diversifying their involvement.
References
Amazon Investor Relations. (2012). Retrieved on 4th May 2012 from http://phx.corporate-ir.net/phoenix.zhtml?p=irol-irhome&c=97664
