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.

“Anyone can create guidelines but unless people subscribe to them, they’re not going to be a lot of use. ”

O’Reilly and Wales’ say the recent circumstances concerning popular blogger Kathy Sierra’s reports of getting death threats are what inspired them to launch this endeavor. But here’s what Robert Scoble told Webpronews concerning the situation,

“Kathy Sierra was in my commentary this morning saying she doesn’t think that these guidelines would have stopped the kind of attacks that she’s now seeing.”

Blogger Andy Beal of Marketing Pilgrim strongly opposes the conduct, and he brought out an interesting point when he told us,

“Another big glaring observation and fault with it, is that it gives the person the opportunity to change the code of conduct as and when they see fit. So if that’s the opportunity that the blogger has that he doesn’t even need to hold himself to his own code of conduct… what’s the point of having one in the first place?”

Another issue that is raised concerning this set of rules is the fact that the bloggers are divided — some want to abide by the guidelines while others do not which will result in long-term problems. Steggles also told us,

“Essentially, people that adhere to these guidelines are going to get more exposure than those who don’t. So… there’s a concern down the road.”

Much concern has been raised as to the future of blogging. Scoble fears the real problem is not being addressed, and the bloggers are going to suffer for it.

“I think it’s too limiting, I think it tries to hit at a problem that I don’t think it would cure.”

Andy Beal also expressed those same concerns when he spoke with us about the matter,

“I think in the long term it will stifle growth that we’re seeing with blogs right now.”

Beal also summed up the feelings of many bloggers when he said,

“Let blogs as a whole continue to grow and thrive.”

The controversy remains–opponents argue that the point of blogging is that there are no rules, while supporters of the set of guidelines say they want a preventable cause of violence.

Conference Promoter and Book Publisher Tim O’Reilly along with Wikipedia creator Jimmy Wales began a set of guidelines for online communication, otherwise known as blogging. After the recent outburst of hostility among well-known bloggers Mr. O’Reilly commented:

“(it) gives us an opportunity to change the level of expectations that people have about what’s acceptable online.”

He has already posted a set of tentative suggestions for improvement on his company website and is asking for comments and feedback. O’Reilly and Wales’ plan is actually to have a few sets of guidelines so that each blogger can pick which one best fits their page, post it, and the viewers know from the beginning what is allowed and what is not.

Mr. Wales said,

“If it’s a carefully constructed set of principles, it could carry a lot of weight even if not everyone agrees.”

Many bloggers already are becoming advocates of the set of guidelines. Popular blogger David Weinberger said,

“The aim of the code is not to homogenize the Web, but to make clearer the informal rules that are already in place anyway.”

O’Reilly and Wales lauched this endeavor after the well-known blogger Kathy Sierra reported getting death threats which brought up the issue of whether or not it is okay to delete certain comments. Sierra says she supports the move to make the web a more civil place.

Opponents of the set of guidelines say the rules violate their freedom of speech. The web is a place that has options – such as remaining anonymous and unaccountable.

Robert Scoble, a popular blogger who stopped blogging for a week when Kathy Sierra’s ordeal became public, says the proposed rules “make me feel uncomfortable.” He also adds, “As a writer, it makes me feel like I live in Iran.”

The guidelines are not meant to be restricting. O’Reilly says,

“That is one of the mistakes a lot of people make; believing that uncensored speech is the most free, when in fact, managed civil dialogue is actually the freer speech;Free speech is enhanced by civility.”