I still like Amazon for books. Is that so wrong? His gist: you can use web services to scale backend operations like hosting at a fraction of the cost of building it yourself. And ultimately, what Bezos is reminding us is that Amazon’s a software company, not an online retailer. But do you want to be #1 in online retail, or another web services company competing with Sun, Microsoft, IBM, HP, etc? Yet Bezos aims to make the case that his take on web services isn’t just like any other company. Time will tell.

Interesting question from Tim O’Reilly: what’s up with the controversy over Alexaholic, especially now that it’s Statsaholic?

Bezos: Alexaholic’s domain still is there, but it redirects to the new site.

Tim: You should all get along. Bezos: There’s no open API for Alexa graphs.

Tim: That was true for Google Maps at first. Come on, kiss and make up. Play nice, kids. Everyone loves Statsholic.

Bezos: This is a business decision. We’ve got trademarks to protect. Talk to the hand, and talk to the lawyer. So there.

[Note: those were not exact quotes]

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