Jeffrey McManus

Back in February I suggested that Amazon and Microsoft should figure out a way to provide Windows Server on Amazon’s EC2 hosting service. Three weeks ago, Amazon announced a private beta of their Windows hosting service on EC2; today they are opening EC2 on Windows up to everyone.

Their pricing is interesting. It’s slightly more than what you’d pay for a Linux distribution, which is no surprise, but if you’re paying for dedicated Windows hosting today, you will still probably save a significant amount of money with EC2 (particularly if you have spikey traffic and need to spin up and take down servers in response to load). A small EC2 instance running Windows Server 2003 will set you back about $91/month ($0.125 per hour). That’s less than half of what we’re paying per dedicated server at our Windows hosting provider today (ServerBeach).

Note, however, that you only get that price if you don’t need SQL Server Standard Edition (the non-crippled version of SQL Server that lets you use all your RAM and hard disk space — that is to say, the only edition you’d ever want to actually use in a production environment). Running SQL Standard on an EC2 instance will set you back $1.10 per hour — more than $800 per month for a single server. Ouch.

It gets worse from there — if you need more than five Windows user accounts, you need to use something called Windows Authentication Services, which costs a lot more. A standard EC2 instance running Windows Server, SQL Server Standard and Authentication Services will set you back something north of $980 per month. I’d be interested to know what kind of user is going to shell out for this package — the pricing seems almost punative.

So it sounds like Windows on EC2 is a great deal, as long as you just use it to run Windows and bag all that other stuff. Bear in mind that you can create spectacular data-driven Web applications without SQL Server. For .NET developers, the ease of programming is the same (since it’s all ADO.NET). Setting up MySQL on Windows is not difficult, and it runs quite well on Windows.

We’ve been doing MySQL on Windows (as well as Linux) for a couple of years now. You might have caught my talks on using MySQL on Windows at the MySQL conferences (both this year and last year) and at the VSLive conferences over past year and a half. If you have or are planning to build a Windows application and host it on EC2, we would love to help you as part of our Amazon Web Services consultancy.

Just posted three new categories of consulting practices over on the consulting web site:

• Facebook (application strategy and development)
• Amazon Web Services (focusing on their S3 storage and EC2 hosting products)
• Fixed-Cost Consulting Engagements

The Facebook and Amazon practices actually aren’t new, but we’ve packaged them up in the form of consulting practices and put them on the web site for the first time.

Fixed-priced consulting is a way for certain types of businesses (particularly startups that haven’t released a product yet) to engage with us on certain focused topics (mostly related to platform strategy and developer adoption) without having to fret too much about what it will cost.

We’re launching these practices at the same time because they’re somewhat related. The Facebook/Amazon EC2 in particular is powerful mojo; we’re just about to release a Facebook application for a client that uses Facebook and EC2 together.

Link: SanDisk Flash Drive to Offer Automatic Web Storage

The web storage service they’re using is none other than Amazon S3. The pricing model (first six months free to get consumers hooked, then $30 a year) is smart, too — providing a fixed price for a variable-priced storage service is crucial for consumers, but at the same time it gives them the opportunity to make an interesting margin. And the markup on this service is gigantic (as much as 500% or more depending on how frequently the user backs up, how much they store and how much data they send).

Yahoo! Search’s "Open Shortcuts" feature is the thing that keeps me using Yahoo! Search. It’s sort of a geek/power user feature, but it’s incredibly useful if you do lots of searches on specific sites. I find search shortcuts particularly useful for media sites such as Netflix and eMusic — because so many web sites talk about media, it’s better to use a site-specific search to cut through all the noise and go straight to the download.

I have shortcuts for Netflix and eMusic already, but it occurred to me this morning that it might be handy to have a search for the Amazon MP3 store as well. So here’s how to use the Yahoo! Open Shortcuts feature with Amazon’s MP3 store:

1. Go to search.yahoo.com
2. Log in to Yahoo! if you aren’t logged in already
3. In the search box, type:
   http://www.amazon.com/gp/search?ie=UTF8&keywords=%s&tag=howtoprogramvisu&index=digital-music&linkCode=ur2&camp=1789&creative=9325<br />
   (copy and paste the contents of this text box)
4. Click on the Search button

You’ll see a confirmation page. Once you’ve confirmed, you can use your shortcut. To do this, from any Yahoo! search box, type:

!mp3 feist

(Replace "Feist" with the name of the artist or song you’re searching for, and don’t forget to precede the whole thing with an exclamation point.) You’ll be taken straight to Amazon.com’s search results for the search term you specified.

Now somebody needs to create a search engine that searches only for downloads from eMusic and Amazon.

Amazon.com added some beefier server configurations to their EC2 virtualization product (and some new price points). You can now get a virtual 64-bit server with 7.5 GB of RAM and 850 GB of storage for $0.40 for hour or a big burrito with 15GB of RAM and 1,690 GB of storage for $0.80 per hour. These are a step up from the basic offering which still costs $0.10 per hour.

Terrific news, Amazon’s Simple Storage Service now has an SLA. This is one of the big features that they were missing and I suspect it’s going to go a long way toward making S3 more attractive as a commodity storage service.

As with a lot of these things, there are a bunch of caveats. They’re only providing service credits against future usage, not refunds, so if something goes totally kablooey and you want to stop using the service, you can’t get your money back. Also, you have to monitor your own success/failure rate (I suspect that S3 developers will start devoting more attention to logging and reporting on their use of the service; we do a lot of this for Approver.com already).

Even if they flawlessly maintain their 99.9% uptime guarantee (or if no of their users ever applies for the credit), simply drawing a line in the sand and saying "this is our uptime guarantee" is a big deal.

I heard a rumor that the one millionth Amazon.com MP3 store fanboy blog post would win a free frozen turkey delivered personally by Jeff Bezos, so here goes.

I needed to buy the Lily Allen record because she’s just cute as a button and appears to embody every facet of British womanhood, so I decided to use the Amazon store to do this. It worked flawlessly after I got the downloader installed. Can’t beat the price, either: US$7.99 for the whole album (just US$0.61 per track), and it’s all encoded as a gorgeous hi-fidelity 256bit VBR MP3.

One minor wrinkle — by default, the downloader is configured to save MP3s to a folder called "Amazon MP3" in your music folder. Having every download service create its own download folder is the wrong choice, but fortunately it’s easily remedied in the program preferences.

The other concern I had is with the download process. Amazon (and eMusic, and lots of others) make you download a little client program that downloads the music tracks for you, presumably so that internet gnomes don’t abscond with the valuable $0.61 music tracks I’m downloading while they’re whipping through the interwebs into my computer. But what happens when there are 20 different competing music stores that I want to buy from? Am I supposed to have 20 different music downloaders installed on all my computers?

Amazon.com is previewing a new home page redesign with some of their users (in the exciting world of springing jarring changes onto the users of unreasonably large web sites, this is known as ‘bucket-testing’). You might not see the changes when you go to Amazon unless they put your account in the test bucket.

I’m not wild about the changes. I like the navigational tabs on top, where they used to be, instead of off to the side. To accommodate this, they made the new design much too wide (about 250 pixels wider than their previous design, I’d estimate — I had to resize my browser so I could see the whole page). The “TV Month” promo also takes up way too much space and the “What Do Customers Buy” widget is out of place on the home page (it should really only appear on a product page, since “What Do Customers Buy” is intended to provide an alternative to a specific product you’re looking at).

I was interested in the announcement of the Amazon Flexible Payment Service; I browsed their documentation on the couch on Sunday night.

I haven’t gotten through it all yet, but at first glance this seems like it’s going to suffer from the same big problem as Google Checkout — it’s only available in the United States, which is not going to cut it for most internet businesses (even if that business happens to be based in the U.S.). Of the thousands of Approver.com users we’ve signed up in the past year, maybe a third seem to be located outside the U.S. and about 10-15% of our paid users are outside the U.S (we think).

I’d be embarrassed to turn away international customers by pulling the plug on PayPal. Doing an online payment system is hard, but getting the banking systems of 160 countries around the world to let you do a payment system is much harder, so I don’t imagine that either Google or Amazon will catch up to PayPal in this area anytime soon. But if Amazon were able to get the EU, Japan and Brazil covered it would go a long way toward making me feel warm and fuzzy about adopting their payment system.

Amazon’s pricing seems comparable to PayPal (2.5% of the transaction plus US$0.30 for transactions over US$10 with special pricing for "microtransactions" so you could do something similar to what PayPal does with iTunes).

Support for recurring payments is handy (we use PayPal’s comparable feature, which they call "subscriptions," on Approver.com today). The ability to co-brand the payment page is also vital for us (and again, PayPal also has this feature).

It *appears* as if you can kick off the payment flow with a SOAP or REST web service API call, something that PayPal has never permitted. I haven’t tried this myself yet but if it works as advertised, this is what Amazon is talking about when they call their service "flexible". In contrast, PayPal flows can only be initiated using a HTML form, which is an enormous pain in the ass for a variety of reasons (particularly so with ASP.NET because of the way it takes over standard HTML form functionality).

The big disruptive thing I see here is the ability to create payment flows where you are neither the sender nor the receiver of money, you’re just facilitating the transaction. This would give you the ability to create marketplace applications (a feature that PayPal doesn’t facilitate for obvious reasons). Unfortunately this feature doesn’t make sense to for us since Approver.com is not a marketplace of documents; I’m not sure it’s going to make a thousand marketplaces bloom, but you never know.

Hooray.

This is exciting not just because DRM blows, but because having more than one major DRM-free vendor in the market will serve as a market counterweight to iTunes’ "OK, we’ll take off the DRM, but charge you 30% more" calculus.

A lot of my opposition to DRM stems from not from some high-minded principle, but the simple fact that I use a lot of different devices to listen to music. I have a desktop machine, a laptop with a virtual machine running inside of it, a couple of iPods, a couple of car CD players, and our Tivo, and I want to listen to my music on all of them. I don’t care to have to have a debate with all those devices over whether I have permission to listen the music I paid for on them.

These days I’m getting most of my music from eMusic, sans DRM. I have the plan that lets you download 50 songs per month, which I originally thought would be too much for me but I’m discovering is just about right for my habits. The 50 song plan is US$14.99 per month, which works out to about US$0.30 per DRM-free song — an incredible value compared to iTunes. (eMusic has monthly plans as cheap as $9.99/month, and you can buy "booster packs" that let you download additional tracks if you run out of downloads for the month, which I did last month. The nice thing about the booster packs is that unlike your monthly downloads, you can download booster pack downloads whenever you want.)

After two years of subscribing to Yahoo Music Jukebox I did unsubscribe from that service yesterday. Dwindling usage combined with an unfortunately-timed price hike made me realize that continuing to pay for this wasn’t a terrific idea for me. I still like the concept of renting music, though, I’m just not wild about the execution in this case. If I jump back into a music rental service it’s going to need to be much cheaper than purchasing tracks and it’s going to somehow need to provide me with a dramatically better discoverability experience than anything else that’s out there today.

I did buy the new They Might Be Giants CD on iTunes yesterday, but only because I couldn’t get it anywhere else. Were it not for the fact that some magic anti-DRM faeries descended upon my PC and converted the DRM-crippled iTunes music to MP3 so I could listen to it on my Tivo, I’d have waited until the album came out somewhere else.

If Amazon applies what they know about discoverability to their music store, I could see myself buying a lot of music there. Hopefully it’ll be better than their initial stab at movies — I’m not seeing a lot of Amazon recommendations for Unbox movies from Amazon today, and their browse experience still isn’t as good as Netflix’s, but it’s early days. Hopefully this will get better over time.

Link: Sold on eBay, Shipped by Amazon.com

"Fulfillment by Amazon, in development for the last three years, is one of the oldest efforts in the company’s stable of Web services. Unlike S3 and other recent initiatives, Fulfillment by Amazon involves the movement of physical goods instead of digital information."

I am sure that the Times’ writer is wrong here about the age of the service and they sure as heck aren’t shipping molecules via the web, although that would be a neat trick.

Link: Both Sales and Earnings Rise Sharply at Amazon

One initiative that has not yet yielded measurable results is Amazon Web Services, in which the company rents out parts of its infrastructure, like its storage computers, to smaller companies that do not want to develop skills that Amazon has honed over the years. Mr. Bezos said it was still too early to judge whether Web Services could generate the same revenue as retail sales. "The market sizes are potentially very large," he said. "How large it can be over what time frame, we’ll have to wait and see. But we are going to keep inventing in that area."

Amazon killed their earnings numbers yesterday and today their stock has popped by 22%, good for them. It was great to see Jeff Bezos specifically call out their web services program on the earnings call.

I am sure that their platform initiatives will be a money-maker for them in time, but it takes a while to build up this kind of business (particularly since so many of their services are totally unique). But Amazon has shown in the past that it’s can build a new business with patience and discipline so I’m sure they’ll get there in a reasonable timeframe.

We’ve watched our second free Unbox movie on Tivo and I have to say I’m warming up to it. I still don’t think it’s a better value than Netflix (we’re particularly missing DVD special features, which we enjoy mightily and Unbox doesn’t provide). But when I am sitting at my desk at 2pm and I think I want to watch a movie that night, waiting for the postman to deliver the next Netflix movie isn’t gonna cut it.

As I browsed their list of movies that you can download to the Tivo, I was surprised to see some recent releases priced at $14.99. Holy crap — who would pay $14.99 for a movie with a 24-hour expiration date when you could buy the DVD (or actually go to the movies) for about the same price? I was surprised to see that that price point is even there, but I suspect that this pricing is a studio thing and not Amazon’s choice. (Update: As my pal Marc points out in comments, the $14.99 price point is for movies that you can download indefinitely — so that’s better, but nowhere near as good as just buying the DVD outright so you can get the special features and play it on different devices.)

The second movie we rented was Accepted, about a guy who doesn’t
get accepted to any college so he and his friends invent their own. It was pretty funny,
but not quite as good as my two favorite tales of college life, Animal
House and the very underrated Porn ‘n Chicken.

Accepted did evoke some of my favorite warm and fuzzy feelings about college (we are now college-age adults so let’s get a six-pack and go sit by the ocean) and I kept thinking "this movie is about how the UCSB College of Creative Studies must have been invented."
But it also seemed to reflect the emerging DYI culture in general. Maybe this was intentional: I’m not sure
how much of Accepted was informed by stuff like Bar Camp, but when the students
put up a board listing the classes they wanted to take (like "Walking Around
and Thinking About Stuff" and "Rocking Your Face Off 202", they self-organized
in the exact way that Bar Camp does.

I tried the new video-on-demand service Amazon Unbox for Tivo yesterday, mainly because of the $15 free credit. Linking the Tivo to my Amazon account was easy as was the download. Amazon’s web site has a long way to go to beat Netflix in terms of discoverability of titles, though. They should really create a separate portal specifically for movies that you can download to Tivo.

My initial reaction is that the service is a teensy bit too expensive and the terms are too restrictive. (You have to watch the movie you download within 30 days and it evaporates off your Tivo 24 hour hours after you watch it.) Because of this, Netflix (or Blockbuster, for that matter) seems like a better value to me.

Still, as an Amazon fan and Tivo stockholder, I have high hopes for this. I think it will take off when the price comes down a bit, and it probably wouldn’t kill them to let you keep the movie on your Tivo for a week or a month, although that would matter much less to me than the price point. It seems like they should be able to bring the price down to less than $4 per movie for one day of viewing since I’m paying for so much of the infrastructure required to get the movie to my house. Maybe that will happen when there are more than one movie providers for Tivo.

Looks like Jeff’s looking to add a couple of evangelists to his team at Amazon. Could be a pretty cool gig if you’re in Seattle.