BI recently published a story on what Amazon will be in 2030. In contrast with their usually interesting predictions, the Amazon story was a bit flat. BI's forecast included these three interesting ideas:
- Amazon will be as big as Wal-Mart; I suspect that new store revenue for Wal-Mart will outpace online sales for Amazon because Wal-Mart will have less competition in China compared with online competitors for Amazon.
- Amazon will sell a lot of merchandise under its own brand (private label); I doubt this because Amazon is not a retailer but rather more of an exchange that facilitates a sale rather than sources its own unique merchandise. (Bezos knows he is not a merchant.)
- Amazon will be the biggest payments company; I think someone more ensconced in the emerging mobile payment system that replaces the role of a bank will be the biggest payment company
My predictions for Amazon in 20 years include:
- Amazon will be a big player in tablets or the next generation of tablets. The Kindle could easily evolve into a low cost tablet with just an operating system and screen upgrade, there is a developer community in the making and an existing infrastructure to provide the ever popular video content. Also, the Kindle has the best form factor of any hand held device on the market (phone or tablet).
- If search becomes more specialized with vertical market search engines, as I expect, then I think Amazon will dominate product/merchandise search. I think Amazon needs to work on integrating more third party content into their product reviews but this is fairly trivial.
- I think Amazon will develop or buy its own cloud based software offering and challenge Google and Microsoft in the Office/productivity space. A bit far fetched, but maybe they will pay us to use the software in return for watching advertisements for products available from Amazon. Their book suggestion engine is already the best available for any category of information and could easily be adopted to a broader range of merchandise.
- I think Amazon will maintain its lead in cloud computing services.
Amazon is perhaps the best run tech company in the world, builds new businesses based on their own internal strengths, has a profound understanding of user interface and does not suffer from feature overrun in any of their offerings. I think Amazon will be the second or third largest company in the U.S. by 2030 unless oil goes to $200/barrel.
