Amazon S3 and Innovation Ecosystems

Amazon S3 is a grid based storage systems that supports many protocols (among them bit torrent) and allows developers to make web-scalable applications. As anybody can imagine is grid based in an architecture similar to the one that Google uses for its servers (inexpensive grid coupled computers, completely fault tolerant). One of the nicest things about Amazon S3 is its price,

• Pay only for what you use. There is no minimum fee, and no start-up cost.
• $0.15 per GB-Month of storage used.
• $0.20 per GB of data transferred.

and the reason why the price is so low -> because they want to create opportunities for innovation and make the innovation ecosystem around it possible.

This is one of many companies that conceive business and innovation beyond the traditional lets make the best product - they realize that social adoption and unexpected uses are key elements for certain type of products and markets and that they can only emerge from a healty ecosystem.