Businessweek has done a very detailed story on Amazon's big new business as a web services provider.

Quoted: Yes, Amazon founder and Chief Executive Jeffrey P. Bezos, the onetime Internet poster boy who quickly became a post-dot-com pinata, is back with yet another new idea. Many people continue to wonder if the world's largest online store will ever fulfill its original promise to revolutionize retailing. But now Bezos is plotting another new direction for his 12-year-old company, which he will lay out on Nov. 8 at San Francisco's Web 2.0 Conference, the annual gathering of the digerati creme. Judging from an advance look he gave BusinessWeek on one recent gray day at Amazon's Seattle headquarters, it's so far from Amazon's retail core that you may well wonder if he has finally slipped off the deep end.

I really like the direction Amazon.com has been taking in the last couple of years with their major initiatives in the Web Services space. This article has Jeff Bezos discussing these new services at the Emerging Technology Conference.

Quoted: By making a handful of Web services applications open to outsiders, Amazon.com is building additional sources of revenue while creating computing models for the future, the CEO said at MIT's ongoing Emerging Technologies Conference.