Amazon.com began as an online bookstore, but has now become a well-known and respected company. Amazon has always pushed simplicity with things such as messaging and storage, but keeping a good, consistent quality. In a keynote at the Web 2.0 Expo in San Fransisco, Tim O’Reilly spoke with Amazon CEO Jeffrey Bezos about his company.

Referring to the future of the company, Amazon wants to build foundational services in order to expand on their solid infrastructure. Although simplicity comes up again, it must be a factor. Users have to be able to understand the basic structure before they can go forward and build upon it. Amazon intends to make money, but according to Bezos, it is still considered an investing company right now.

Amazon has many services and has plans to launch even more. Amazon S3 is one service and is storage for the Internet. According to Bezos, they have Amazon S3 all figured out, but the EC2, they are still developing. Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) is a web service that provides re-sizable compute capacity in the cloud. Both the S3 and the EC2 are designed to make web-scale computing easier for developers. Right now, the EC2 is invitation-only, in order for current customers to get good service, before they take any new customers. At this point, Amazon is capacity constrained, but hopes to change their status to be demand constrained. Bezos also explains Amazon’s Fulfillment Center and how it works.

When asked about the future of Amazon, Bezos response is interesting. Instead of looking into what may change, look at what will not change. He advises to build a stable strategy around what will not change in the future.

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