he meeting had dragged on for more than an hour that rainy day in Seattle, and Jeff Bezos had heard enough. The CEO had rounded up 15 or so senior engineers and managers in one of Amazon’s offices to tackle a question buzzing inside the company: Should Amazon bust open the doors of its most prized data warehouse, containing its myriad databases, and let an eager world of entrepreneurs scavenge through its data jewels?
For several years, scores of outsiders had been knocking on Amazon’s door to gain access to the underlying data that powers the $7 billion retailer: product descriptions, prices, sales rankings, customer reviews, inventory figures, and countless other layers of content. In all, it was a data vault that Amazon had spent more than 10 years and a billion dollars to build, organize, and safeguard.
So why on earth would Bezos suddenly hand over the keys? Because in the hands of top Web innovators, some at the meeting argued, Amazon’s data could be the dynamo of new websites and businesses that would expand the company’s already gigantic online footprint and ultimately drive more sales. Others worried about the risks. A free-forall, one manager warned, would “change our business in ways we don’t understand.”
Bezos ended the debate with characteristic gusto. He leaped from his seat, aping a flasher opening a trench coat.
“We’re going to aggressively expose ourselves!” he declared.
Today, there’s considerable reason to cheer Bezos’ exhibitionist move. Since the company opened up its data vaults in 2002 under the auspices of a project first called Amazon
Web Services, more than 65,000 developers, businesses, and other entrepreneurs have tapped into the data. With it,

FIGURE 5.1

Amazon and eBay have opened up many of their databases to developers and entrepreneurs to broaden and facilitate the buying and selling process for their associates and customers.
Source: John Flournoy/MHHEDIL

they’re building moneymaking websites, new online shopping interfaces, and innovative services for thousands of
Amazon’s independent sellers. Many have become Bezos’ most ambitious business partners overnight. “Two years ago this was an experiment,” says Amazon’s engineering chief, Al
Vermeulen. “Now it’s a core part of our strategy.”
And that’s just at Amazon. A year after Bezos’ decision to open Amazon’s databases to developers and business partners, eBay chief executive Meg Whitman answered a similar cry from eBay’s developer community, opening the $3 billion company’s database of 33 million weekly auction items to the technorati. Some 15,000 developers and others have since registered to use that prized database and access other software features. Already, 41 percent of eBay’s listings are uploaded to the site using software that takes advantage of these newly accessible resources.
At Google, too, the concept is finding its legs: The company parcels out some of its search-results data and recently unlocked access to its desktop and paid-search products.
Now dozens of Google-driven services are cropping up, from custom Web browsers to graphical search engines.
Compared to Amazon and eBay however, Google is taking baby steps. Developers can grab 1,000 search results a day for free, but anything more than that requires special permission. In January 2005, Google finally opened up its AdWords paid-search service to outside applications, allowing marketers to automate their Google ad campaigns.
What’s behind the open-door policies? True to their pioneering roots, Bezos, Whitman, and the Google boys are pushing their companies into what they believe is the Web’s great new beyond: an era in which online businesses operate as open-ended software platforms that can accommodate thousands of other businesses selling symbiotic products and services. Says longtime tech-book publisher Tim
O’Reilly, “We can finally rip, mix, and burn each other’s websites.” Most people think of Amazon as the world’s largest retailer, or “earth’s biggest bookstore,” as Bezos called it in its start-up days. Inside the company, those perceptions are decidedly old school. “We are at heart a technology company,” Vermeulen says. He and Bezos have begun to view
Amazon as simply a big piece of software available over the
Web. “Amazon. com is just another application on the platform,” Vermeulen says.
Eric von Hippel, a business professor at MIT’s Sloan
School of Management, explains the old rules: “We come from a culture where if you invested in it, you kept it. That was your competitive advantage.” The rise of open-source software certainly challenged that notion. The rise of open databases and Web services goes even further, holding out the promise of automating the links between online businesses by applications which depend on companies sharing their vital data.