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Originally Posted by kennyc
Which is just simply wrong. There are significant costs in both hardware and personnel to manage the databases, updates, etc. involved.
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But there's no hardware. e2c and s3 are entirely virtualized. They're abstract environments. There's no maintenance at -all- of kindle systems because there are no specific kindle systems. Every single time you download something from amazon you're doing it from a virtual system. These systems are created on demand to balance the load.
Do these virtual systems run on physical hardware? Absolutely. Does the physical hardware require maintenance? Certainly. But does anyone go into the server hall and say "I need to fix the kindle servers"? No. There are no specific systems dedicated to anything, everything is virtual. When a physical system goes down hundreds or even thousands of virtual systems blink off as well, but then they're instantly load-balanced to another virtual instance. That's the whole point of e2c and s3 (for storage).
Thus, there's zero hardware costs for kindle in specific. This is easily verifiable since amazon was doing e2c and s3 long before kindle arrived, and they'd be doing it whether or not kindle existed today. If they fix a physical server then you can't say they're doing it because kindle needs it, they're doing it because e2c needs it. You might argue that "didn't they have to expand when they opened the kindle store" but even that reasoning doesn't work since they're selling surplus resources. If they have a surplus then they don't need all the resources they've already got.
On the topic of content updates we'll have to agree to disagree. I've never heard of anyone maintaining indexes doing manual updates unless there's specific complaints. Not like they can even do manual updates when a book is updated since it's updated by the publishers or authors, not by amazon. With update I mean corrected spelling, extra content, et cetera.