Amazon exec makes comparison to the advent of electricity SANTA CLARA, Calif. — Comparing Web services to the advent of electricity in homes, an Amazon official at the Web Services Edge 2003 West conference here Tuesday stressed that an economic model must emerge to proliferate the use of the technology.The official, Allan Vermeulen, CTO at Amazon, also said Web services would be similar to Java in that the initial excitement about the programming language in 1995 was about applets, but it instead has emerged as a back-end server technology. Web services will follow a similar path in extending beyond its b-to-b application integration intentions to unthought-of areas, according to Vermeulen.“What I wanted to start [with] saying is, I’m excited about Web services. I think Web services are a terrific thing,” Vermeulen said at the start of a boisterous presentation that featured back-and-forth comparisons between electricity and Web services. Citing the story of Sam Unsell, an early Edison employee who developed an economic model for electricity use in Chicago, Vermeulen encouraged audience members to figure out an economic model to drive innovation in Web services.“Somebody has to be the Sam Unsell of Web services and come up with a good idea,” said Vermeulen.Electricity applications, he said, started with the electric light bulb and proceeded to clothes irons, 92-pound vacuum cleaners, and washing machines without on/off switches. Many applications, such as shoe warmers, never gained any traction. Web services now is charting an analogous growth path from b-to-b integration to enabling interfacing to e-commerce sites, Vermeulen said. He cited extensions to Amazon.com and Google.com that allow users to interface to these sites through the use of Web services. Amazon’s Associates program lets developers provide unique interfaces to Amazon e-business services, with developers getting a small percentage of any subsequent sales. Developers can use Web services or HTML.Vermeulen cited sites such as Groxis.com, which interfaces with Amazon via Web services. But he called Amazon’s current economic model around Web services “primitive as Hell.”“In my opinion, Web services is just at the point where we’re waiting for some of these key innovations and we haven’t seen them yet,” Vermeulen said, adding that, “I think all the pieces are in place.” Responding to an audience question, Vermeulen said he did not think the most challenging issues to building Web services at Amazon have been approached yet because the company is just getting started. There have been issues with scaling and getting APIs right, but Amazon’s experience has been very positive so far, he said.Amazon plans to expand its use of Web services, to allow, for example, sellers to upload merchandise onto its site, Vermeulen said. Software Development