The sites that set their sights on domination
Large online companies are co-opting the services of smaller websites in order to win even more ‘eyeballs', writes Richard Waters
Will the web come to be dominated by a handful of e-commerce “platforms” sites with the reach and power to act as the traffic cops of the commercial internet?
That certainly seems to be what the leading US e-commerce companies have in mind. As consumer e-commerce spreads like wildfire around the world, companies such as Amazon.com, eBay and Yahoo see themselves as playing a far wider role.
Their aim: to act as the starting point for as many transactions as possible, directing customers to a much wider array of secondary e-commerce sites while also keeping a large slice of the business for themselves.
“The bottom line for all these sites is eyeballs,” says Michael Cusumano, professor of management at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. That means, in part, letting smaller e-commerce operators draw on their technology to help with activities such as transaction processing or customer verification. “These businesses, multiplied hundreds of times, bring a lot more eyeballs to their sites,” says Mr Cusumano.
To extend their influence, both eBay and Amazon are playing host to other online businesses, turning themselves into virtual shopping malls. Along with Google, they are also opening up their technology to a wider group of sites, letting others build some of their own services on top of these technological foundations.
Microsoft remains the textbook example in the technology industry of the power of this kind of platform strategy. Its Windows operating system achieved a monopoly in desktop computing largely because of the company's success in attracting independent software developers to write their applications to run on its software.
To win over developers, software companies make available their “applications programming interfaces”, or APIs the software “hooks” that let applications connect to the operating system.
That same approach is now being adopted by the leading internet sites: Google and eBay, for instance, have both started to make their APIs available to encourage others to build their own internet “applications” on top of their sites.
Amazon, for instance, lets other websites draw on the e-commerce “tools” such as its shopping-cart technology and search function that it uses on its own site. It also gives site owners access to much of the “content” on Amazon, such as details and pictures of products as well as reviews submitted by customers.
“We want to expose the guts of Amazon to the broader community and see if other people can find ways of using [it] that surprise us,” says Jeff Bezos, chairman and chief executive officer of Amazon. This echoes the success of Microsoft, which benefited from the creativity of a vast group of independent programmers though it also ended updominating the biggestareas of PC applicationssoftware with its ownOffice suite of programs.
In the internet world, the approach being adopted by Amazon goes under the broad name of “web services”. In the jargon of the moment, companies such as Amazon “expose” parts of their technology or data, letting others combine these with software elements taken from other places, or written anew, to create their own internet services.
The business models that show how to make money out of these services have yet to be developed. But Mr Bezos says: “If you can work out how to charge, it's something a lot of people could do.”
Meanwhile, getting users to pay separately for the technology may end up being only a small part of the benefit that the big e-commerce companies could see in the long run.
If the strategy leads to a broader presence on the internet for the goods available on its own site, then it would greatly expand the reach of the Amazon marketplace. Other websites, drawing on its content, would act as funnels to send more eyeballs to Amazon.
E-commerce platforms like these may never achieve the dominance of Windows, says Mr Cusumano, but “in some ways it could be analogous”. He adds that, with steadily rising traffic volumes, they could start to benefit from the “network effects” that let success feed on itself.
大网站利用小网站
少数几个电子商务“平台”网站具有担当商业互联网交通警察的影响范围和能力，未来互联网是否会是它们的天下？
这肯定是几家主要的美国电子商务公司似乎正在考虑的发展方向。当消费者电子商务有如燎原之火迅速在全球蔓延之际，Amazon.com、eBay和雅虎(Yahoo)等公司发现自己的施展空间更为广阔。
他们的目标是：尽可能多地充当交易的起点，将客户引向种类更为繁多的二级电子商务网站，同时也为自己保留相当大的业务份额。
“对于所有这些网站来说，关键就是‘眼球’，”麻省理工学院管理学教授迈克尔?库苏玛诺(Michael Cusumano)说。这在某种程度上意味着，让较小的电子商务运营商利用自己的技术进行交易处理或客户身份验证等活动。“这些小企业数目巨大，最终可为大型网站带来更多眼球，” 库苏玛诺先生说。
为扩大影响力，eBay和Amazon正接纳其它网上业务，使自己变成虚拟的大型购物中心。和Google一样，他们也向更多的网站公开自己的技术，使它们能在这些技术的基础上开发自己的服务。
就这类平台战略的力量而言，微软(Microsoft)仍然堪称科技工业的典范，其Windows操作系统之所以能在桌面计算领域取得垄断，在很大程度上是因为微软成功吸引了独立软件开发者编写能在微软操作系统上运行的应用程序。
为争取开发者，软件公司提供其“应用编程接口”（API），也就是能使应用程序与操作系统相连的软件。
一些主要的互联网站也正在采用相同的方法。例如，Google和eBay都已开始开放其“应用编程接口”，鼓励其它公司在其网站上编写自己的互联网“应用程序”。
还有，Amazon把自己网站上所用的电子商务工具，包括购物篮技术和搜索功能，向其它网站开放。Amazon也给予网站所有人访问Amazon上许多内容的权限，如产品的详细资料和图片以及客户提交的评论。
“我们想向更广泛的业内人士公开Amazon的内核，看看其他人是否能找到让我们惊喜的使用方法，”Amazon董事长兼首席执行官杰夫?贝佐斯(Jeff Bezos)说。这与微软的成功经验有异曲同工之妙。微软曾得益于一大批独立程序员的创造力，但最终它以自己的Office套装软件在个人计算机应用软件领域独占最大份额。
在互联网世界中，Amazon现在所采用的模式属于广义的“网络服务”。用现今的行话来说，Amazon之类的企业“披露”他们的一部分技术或数据，让其他人将这些与来自其它地方或重新编写的软件元素结合起来，创建他们自己的互联网服务。
表明如何从这些服务赢利的商业模式仍有待发展，但贝佐斯先生说：“如果你能解决如何收费的问题，那么许多人都能做这件事。”
同时，从长远来看，让使用者为技术单独付费，可能最终只是大型电子商务公司能看到的利益的一小部分。
如果这一策略能使Amazon网站上的商品在互联网上的覆盖面更广，那么它将大幅扩展Amazon市场的广度。其它使用Amazon内容的网站，将充当向Amazon发送更多眼球的“渠道”。
此类电子商务平台可能永远不会再现Windows的压倒性统治地位，但库苏玛诺先生表示，“有些方面可以是相似的。”他补充说，随着访问量的稳步上升，它们有望开始得益于成功带来更大成功的“网络效应”
