Amazon.com

Technological Systems in its Business

Most people think of Amazon.com as an online bookseller. Amazon does, of course sell books a lot of them, in fact. But what Jeff Bezos, CEO of Amazon.com, says about the company reveals a much bigger picture. "We really are a technology company; that's mostly what we do," he said in a CSE colloquium in 2002. (Amazon.com: Differentiating with Technology, 2002). Amazon uses technology to differentiate itself from all of its competitors. As Bezos puts it, "We not only let customers find products but let products find customers."

Amazon.com is unique in its market in that it is constantly using technology to find new ways to bring the products to the customers. One of its techniques is personalization, a way of identifying who the customer is and recognizing him every time he visits their online store. The system remembers the customer's interests, keeps track of his purchases, and suggests new products consistent with his past purchases. If the customer forgets having bought a particular CD and starts to buy it again, the web site reminds him, "You bought this item on�" and lists the date of purchase just in case the customer is buying it again by accident. Jeff Bezos believes you can never go wrong by providing good customer service. (Amazon.com: Differentiating with Technology, 2002).

Amazon's vast technological empire is not without its problems, however. With all of the cutting-edge technologica

reducing the overhead on system processing inherent in managing multiple threads. Another option would be to address the problem from a systems management/procedural standpoint rather than a strictly technical one. Amazon.com is constantly being modified by a large number of people to address changing business goals, and some of these modifications are large-scale. Furthermore, new people are being added to the staff all the time, making it very difficult to achieve full accountability, traceability, and consistency in the code. It is doubtful that every person who works on the programs is familiar with all the code and also with all the modifications that are being made. Certainly in developing systems, there are payoffs in being able to limit the number of people who have access to the programs and can modify them. A third option would be to make the system entirely modular. Modularity makes it easier to find and change code without affecting other code in the system, and it is much easier to distribute among a number of programmers without causing errors. Modules can easily be added or removed with only minimal changes to a restricted number of other modules in most cases just the main driver, in fact. Furthermore, it

Category: Science - A