<story><title>Don’t look now, but AWS might be a billion-dollar biz</title><url>http://gigaom.com/cloud/dont-look-now-but-aws-might-be-a-billion-dollar-biz/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>InclinedPlane</author><text>Regardless of what you think about the 37 Signals folks one bit of their advice has always struck me as being particularly insightful and powerful:&lt;p&gt;Sell your byproducts.&lt;p&gt;There are two very strong reasons to do this. First, it can be an excellent business. You&apos;ve created something to solve some problem or remove some pain that your company is feeling, it&apos;s extremely unlikely that your company is so unique that it&apos;s pain isn&apos;t shared by other companies. And it&apos;s unlikely your internal tools would be of no interest or utility to other companies.&lt;p&gt;Second, internal tools are typically of terrible quality. There are various reasons for this but it&apos;s a very common pattern due to fundamental pressures and incentives. By selling internal tools you force them to have owners and you force them to have a quality sufficient to be acceptable to the market. This generally vastly increases their quality, which provides a benefit to everyone who uses them, including you.</text></comment>
<story><title>Don’t look now, but AWS might be a billion-dollar biz</title><url>http://gigaom.com/cloud/dont-look-now-but-aws-might-be-a-billion-dollar-biz/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>treeform</author><text>Not surprising, they brought cloud computing to the masses and are doing a pretty good job at it too.</text></comment>