Limitless power in the cloud

Here's a fascinating NYT story about Amazon Web Services, the division of the giant which rents out vast amounts of computing power in the cloud.

Within a few years, Amazon.com’s creative destruction of both traditional book publishing and retailing may be footnotes to the company’s larger and more secretive goal: giving anyone on the planet access to an almost unimaginable amount of computing power.

It means startups can function with far fewer people. That has employment consequences of course, especially if new small businesses are the traditional major source of new jobs. .

And it speeds up the pace of disruptive innovation. Take one new company , Cue:

“I have 10 engineers, but without A.W.S. I guarantee I’d need 60,” said Daniel Gross, Cue’s 20-year-old co-founder. “It just gets cheaper, and cheaper, and cheaper.” He figures Cue spends something under $100,000 a month with Amazon but would spend “probably $2 million to do it ourselves, without the speed and flexibility.”

We've already seen signs this is impacting the economy in a report from the Kauffmann Foundation.

(h/t G!)