Quote:
Originally Posted by SteveEisenberg
Then it would be tempting to me to take Bezos's machine cycles with no possibility of him profiting from it.
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And he *still* wouldn't mind.
Amazon's machine cycles are paid for by the subscribers to AWS. And even if they weren't he'd still be happy to have you using his system instead of generating eyeball traffic for google.
See, there is this old-school mindset that every last service or benefit must be directly paid for in hard currency, on the spot, that totally ignores the indirect value of consumer activity. (Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Kim DotCom and the hosts of most every "free" pirate content site out there in the nether regions, they all know there is money to be made off "free". We aren't just the consumer; most of the time *we* are the product.)
Let's say you do use Amazon to research everything you buy but choose to buy elsewhere. Well, every item you research is logged by Amazon and it helps them build a database of user interest. So they can tell what people are thinking of buying as well as what they are buying from them. And that information, in the aggregate, has economic value. Probably enough to defray the cost of browser queries. (Their system is *very* cheap to run.)
Just the fact that we are even mentioning Amazon right now is generating a few fractions of a cent of income for them at some point in the near future.
