Inside an Amazon Warehouse 206
redletterdave writes "In each one of Amazon.com's 80 fulfillment centers around the globe, Amazon relies on barcodes and human hands rather than robots or automation to find and ship the proper items in a quick and efficient manner. Without robots, Amazon utilizes a system known as 'chaotic storage,' where products are essentially shelved at random but are tagged with barcodes to be scanned at every step of the ordering, selection and shipping process. The real advantage to chaotic storage is that it's significantly more flexible than conventional storage systems. If there are big changes in a product range, the company doesn't need to plan for more space, because the products or their sales volumes don't need to be known or planned in advance if they're simply being stored at random. Free space is also better utilized in a chaotic storage system, and it's also a major time saver to not organize products as they come in. This system is the true key to Amazon.com's success in online retail."
My desk isn't a mess! (Score:5, Funny)
I utilize a chaotic storage system.
Re:My desk isn't a mess! (Score:4, Funny)
But I bet Amazon are jealous of that highly advanced method...
Hmm... (Score:5, Funny)
It sounds like someone needs to run a defrag on those warehouses.
Re:Hmm... (Score:5, Funny)
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Have you ever tried to get a teenager to defrag his room?
Well, mine are pretty good at fragging theirs...
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Have you ever tried to get a teenager to defrag his room?
Yes. I tried for years and years. Then I had an idea which was quite weird. I told him that I do not care about his room, just no biological warfare lab stuff.
So one day, several months later, he asks if some friends can spend the night. I told him, "sure, not a problem."
The next day after his friends leave, he starts cleaning his room religiously and has kept it clean ever since. Why? Because he was embarassed by one of his friends comments on his room.
So simple. I wish I had thought of it earlier. I guess
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Actually it sounds like the warehouse storage is in a constant state of defrag and deliberately without full file reorder.
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Very easy to teach to someone, very easy to learn. You just better have some good running legs :)
I suspect that they don't run too far.
Seems unlikely they would pick an entire order, just the parts near their station.
Then they plop the tagged bin onto the conveyor which sends all the bins of a given order to a common location for boxing.
I'm guessing they get pick sheets for multiple orders at once (looking at the pictures [ibtimes.com] seems to suggest they are picking into multiple bins in push carts) and the pick sheets are arranged in "elevator seeking" [wikipedia.org] order so they can complete one planned circuit through thei
May be an interesting slide show... (Score:5, Insightful)
May be nice if that site works with the latest Firefox, too... been a while since I had an issue with a site just not working.
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Odd. I was just about to say that the slideshow doesn't work in Opera--12.11. Only the first picture shows up.
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Since is has a video clip that starts playing automatically, I wasn't there long enough to know that it wouldn't work with Firefox.
ADHD girl (Score:5, Funny)
My room is a disaster. My bed isn't made, nobody can find anything in here but me, and I have a couple bras right now hanging on the lamp to dry because there's nowhere else to put them. According to this article, I should be a major, successful retail vendor. So if that's true, instead of expecting me to be a billionaire or the President, my mom keeps telling me that at this point, she'd be happy if I'd just breed?
Re:ADHD girl (Score:5, Funny)
Barcodes! You need barcodes!
Re:ADHD girl (Score:5, Funny)
Barcodes! You need barcodes!
To breed? Jeez... I knew I was missing something obvious.
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Re:ADHD girl (Score:4, Funny)
Breeding requires a male-to-female adaptor plug...
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Breeding requires a male-to-female adaptor plug...
Only if you're gay, otherwise adapter plug not needed. Not that there's anything wrong with that.
Re:ADHD girl (Score:5, Funny)
Oh I so want that! (Score:3)
Just imagine, a girl with all the bits labeled with barcodes so you can scan them and google the manual for it! And easily order replacement parts.
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You still have to do it manually.
Re: ADHD girl (Score:2)
Bra codes you fool!
Re:ADHD girl (Score:5, Funny)
Oh man, little do you know.
There's a veritable minefield of codes to navigate when it comes to women. :)
Re:ADHD girl (Score:5, Funny)
my mom keeps telling me that at this point, she'd be happy if I'd just breed?
Just don't breed with a fellow geek or your kids are likely to turn out just like you, only more so. Just like us male geeks should be going for the prettiest, bimboest, bikini babes we can find, you should be going for a handsome jock who prefers grunts to words. Have fun with that ;)
I married for beauty rather than for brains... unfortunately she turned out to be just as geeky as me and as a result my oldest daughter is almost too nerdy to function :)
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Dude, I think you missed the "intraining" part of girlintraining. No problem with the gender identification issue, but girlintraining is never going to bear a child via "natural" means in his/her lifetime without some major advances.
Didn't notice the username. I assumed the reference to a bra implied breasts which in turn implied the rest of the required biological capacity to bear children.
Don't ever plan on getting old then. (Score:3)
I use very much the same system in my room. Worked fine when I was young, had a brilliant memory and knew where everything was. Now I'm at the "get off my lawn" age, I forget where I put things within two minites of putting them down, Spend half my life looking for things.
Would get myself organised, but at my age the payback time is probably not worth the time spent doing it.
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Also forgot how to spell minutes :)
Na, never did know how to spell it, I'm an ex-programer and dyslexic - all the best programers are dyslexic :)
(and I had to look up to see if dysleic was spelt with a i or a y !)
Re:ADHD girl (Score:5, Funny)
My room is a disaster. My bed isn't made, nobody can find anything in here but me, and I have a couple bras right now hanging on the lamp to dry because there's nowhere else to put them. According to this article, I should be a major, successful retail vendor.
Correlation is not causation!
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If you have actually implemented a hashtable to document the locations of your belongings
I have, it's called my memory. Of course if the data isn't refreshed every so often, it can become corrupt.
Walmart do the same (Score:4, Insightful)
If you've ever worked at Wallmart or I guess any of the other major supermarkets, they do the same thing. Store stuff whereever and track where it is. So it might be organized on the computer, but in the storerooms its real-world location bears no relation to it's computerized structure.
Again for the same reason, seasonality and holidays etc. mean the sales are not constants and stocks of different items vary, and with small space at the supermarket for storage, it doesn't make sense to dedicate empty space to storing *potential* stuff.
But hey, perhaps Bezo's plans to patent it, like one click ordering. So he's pretending it's a new thing.
Humans? (Score:2)
Re:Humans? (Score:5, Informative)
As for humans getting rest, in many countries if you end up without a job and are not in the "ruling caste" the rest of the people don't seem to think you deserve to get any $$$$ for "resting" aka "doing nothing productive".
Careful for what you ask for, you may get it.
Re:Humans? (Score:5, Interesting)
The first world societies have to understand real soon that they need to figure out what to do with the jobless masses with IQs under 110 in fifty years. The answer can't be "pay them to breed more crack babies", the answer has to be "each generation values breeding less and eduction more" - or expect their economy to sink under the economic sea like most of the PIGS probably will.
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And, of course, Amazon eventually acquired Kiva which is a strong hint that what I said in my post is likely to be their goal.
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Easy, get rid of the earned income tax credit and make failure to file and or pay a capital crime for persons over 18. We have just have them all lined up an shot on April 16th. It will even broaden the base!
Seriously though it is a real problem and there is a total leadership vacuum around the issue. The whole "winning the future" thing misses the point. We can invest all we want in education but there is still going to be an ever growing segment of the population who simply lack the innate talent to b
Re:Humans? (Score:5, Insightful)
Well, the problem of "masses" is taking care of itself [wikipedia.org]. No need for government policy there; market forces are driving population growth down.
As to the "IQ under 110," there are lots of productive and necessary jobs that can't easily be automated. It's going to be a long time before a robot can cook a gourmet meal or repair a leaky faucet or give me a good haircut.
One doesn't need to be educated or even terribly smart to be a productive member of society. One just needs a work ethic.
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Someone hasn't been paying attention to demographics over time; first-world nations have negative birth rates (I think that's the term; replacement rates lower than 1:1). Third-world nations that get a boost in living conditions have slowing birth rates (usually takes a generation and change for birth rate reduction to catch up with infant mortality reduction, iirc). America and Canada and suchlike have population growth primarily from immigration, but they need to keep importing immigrants because the chil
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>Don't you think a company of Amazon's size should spend some of those billions on some modern industrial robots so that the humans can get a rest?
How many humans whose last job was "stacked boxes in a wharehouse" would be able to feed themselves and their families if they did that ?
It may or may not make business sense - but pretending that mass layoffs is somehow humanitarian is a new level of low.
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No, because then you'd be angry at them for killing jobs. Everyone knows that big companies will be vilified no matter what they do. So it really only makes sense for them to do whatever is most economical.
If the general public actually had the intellect to rival our poo flinging primate cousins; than maybe there would be hope for corporate responsibility but as it stands companies like Amazon and lately even Google can't be win in the court of public opinion no matter what they do so they may as well jus
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I'm all for using technology to replace people in dangerous, hard, boring and/or repetitive work.
Humans should be prepared by their parents, and society, to be able to earn a decent living in fulfilling roles.
BUT
Many of them, sadly, are not. Working in a warehouse is hard, (I've done it), but at least you're inside, and it's better to have a job than not have one.
Not just from a financial aspect, but more importantly from a social one.
Keep the robots for the really dangerous stuff, and keep job opportuniti
Re:Humans? (Score:5, Informative)
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I have worked at such a warehouse as christmas reinforcement, and can confirm the soul-crushingness of the job. The only reason I took it was I was in a spot where it was either take a last-minute job, or lose my apartment. The work is grueling, brainless, and people will hate you for every little fuckup that happens because it holds up the line. The routine is: Grab a bin from the conveyor belt, find the entries on the included list that are located in your division, put labels on them, put them in the bin
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And people point to worker conditions in China about slave wages, long hours, and suicidal tenancies. Compared to Amazon warehouses, though, these Chinese workers get lots more money working at some horrible factory in Guandong than their peers, while in the US, the pay still can't sustain a living.
Yet hedge fund managers...
Not so terrible (Score:2, Interesting)
I work at a fulfillment warehouse and it's actually a great place to work. Granted, I'm an office geek but we take care of our hourly workers very well. Everything we do to modify the shipping process (basically an assembly line) is to make things not only quicker but easier on the workers as well. Everyone is encouraged to make contributions to the team and there is plenty of opportunity to move up, get raises etc. Benefits are excellent and the pay is good. Nobody gets chewed out for making a mistake
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They don't have to be. One approach is to create high churn through abusive behavior and unreasonable KPIs; this works if you don't really care that much about error rates and don't need your personnel to be able to do more complicated tasks besides "pick, pack, ship." On the other hand, at my company (we do aviation fulfillment), our warehouse personnel are paid well, given reasonable KPIs, and treated well, and so our churn is extremely low. I believe this year our warehouse churn has been 0%, and it's hi
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This article about what it was like at an Amazon fulfillment center in PA. Backbreaking work with ever increasing demands topped off with many workers passing out from heatstroke. Inside Amazon's Warehouse: Lehigh Valley workers tell of brutal heat, dizzying pace at online retailer [mcall.com]
Sounds similar to a certain filesystem... (Score:2)
More info:
http://www.skytopia.com/project/articles/filesystem.html [skytopia.com]
http://fishbowl.pasti [pastiche.org]
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Why do that, when you can have an organized directory structure and searchable file tags [wikipedia.org]? The two aren't mutually exclusive, you know.
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Besides that minor issue, Microsoft isn't exactly encouraging people to use virtual folders (and do third-party programs allow you to save metadata when saving files?). Does it utilize a realtime filterable window like Everything [voidtools.com], where you can search for something in an instant based on the metadata they contain? I very much doubt it. That's a vital part of the tech if a me
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Well, the company I work for does just that (I won't mention the name but it is easy enough to find...) minus the realtime filtering (we kind of have that on some properties but not the way Everything does it, at least not yet) - you have to click the search button to get filtered results (it searches metadata and file contents, quick search) or you can build your own search down to the very finest specification and these can be saved as views, and everything (including permissions!) are driven by the metad
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It is completely in-house project. We have various parts that are off the self components in the product like OCR and a few other pieces but the filesystem stuff is 100% our code.
Re:Sounds similar to a certain internet (Score:2)
Don't we have something called the world wide web that's a bit like that now?
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... yeah, real nice. (Score:2, Informative)
Amazon warehouse jobs push workers to physical limit
http://seattletimes.com/html/businesstechnology/2017901782_amazonwarehouse04.html
I Was a Warehouse Wage Slave
http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2012/02/mac-mcclelland-free-online-shipping-warehouses-labor
Humans vs. Robots (Score:5, Interesting)
Chaotic storage works because the barcode of each shelved item is scanned together with the barcode of its shelve, so that the computer can later on tell the humans where to find the stuff for a certain order.
Apparently there is no reason why this wouldn't work with robots. Apparently robots are still to expensive or not smart (in terms of physical skills) enough.I wonder when we'll see Amazon experimenting with robots.
Re:Humans vs. Robots (Score:5, Insightful)
It's likely mostly the physical skill of opening a wrapper and taking a book out of it. Or worse, some odd shaped item. That's stuck in the tight wrapper.
The first (and only photo visible to me) on that that site showed a bunch of shipping pallets aligned haphazardly with cartons stacked on top of them. Assuming one item per pallet, you go find the pallet (easy), then find which carton is currently open already (harder), then manouvre your arms and hands to take an item out of the carton (that's the tough one - especially the getting your fingers around it part), and place it in your shopping trolley or whatever they use there (easy again).
Finding and scanning bar codes may also be tricky, as they're likely not on fixed locations.
Current robots work where a blind man could work. They are as good as blind, after all. And need to know exactly where to find a product, and how to take one and only one. That's not easy with all those odd shaped, and constantly changing products.
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The wrapper thing is laughably easy to solve: Amazon would simply have to tell their suppliers that if they don't pack stuff in a standardized box they won't buy from them.
Re:Humans vs. Robots (Score:4)
There is a simple reason everything comes in different sized cartons: all products are different size. Outer and inner cartons must be full and not leave any room for a product to move around in it, or it would be damaged in transport. So unless you standardise the size of all your products, that's not going to work.
Standardising carton sizes would result in having to add heaps of filler material (adds cost: material and labour) and wasting space in trucks and shipping containers (adds more cost: less payload per job). That filler material will also mess up your robotics seriously - you still don't know where your product really is, and have more stuff to dig through.
Really, your "laughably easy" solution is just not a solution. Otherwise it would have been done already, look at other parts of transport: the Euro pallet has a size that makes them fit perfectly in rail road cars. Trucks are now being built to fit Euro pallets perfectly. And as much as possible, cartons are made to fit those pallets perfectly. For overseas transport, a 40' shipping container fits twenty standard pallets (1x1.2m) with very little room to spare. And manufacturers will make sure that their cartons stay as close as possible within those measurements. Big bags have a 1x1m footprint, and while their height may vary, the regular heights allow them to be stacked two or three on top of each other for a perfect fit.
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I'm not suggesting that there should be a single standard carton; rather, that there be a small number of standard sizes much as Amazon does with the cardboard boxes they deliver things in.
Good point about filler material, though, since you're likely to still have some gap.
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They sure seem to be treating humans as robots [motherjones.com] already. And yes, the humans are cheaper to operate.
Not all roses... (Score:5, Interesting)
I work in a fulfilment centre myself, and i can say that while the storage is very efficient, as mentioned, the algorithms that rout pickers to collect the various items leave a lot to be desired. Its all well and good having ingenious storage systems, but if you have to spend 2 minutes walking to a particular shelf location to collect item X passing 8 different bins containing item X along the way, it wastes huge amounts of time and effort. For example, our fulfilment centre is LOSING $250000 due simply to pick-routing inefficiencies...
Re:Not all roses... (Score:5, Insightful)
The reason you have to go to a particular bin is that the company likely runs a FIFO inventory system, so they want you to pick the oldest items first. There are various good reasons to do this (we do it too in normal manufacturing inventory).
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Re:Not all roses... (Score:5, Interesting)
The traveling salesman only becomes hell when the number of stops is very high, and it is relatively expensive to know the cheapest route before point A and point B. The thing is, neither of those is true in a warehouse.
I don't know how long a typical route is for an Amazon picker, but when I was writing warehouse software, pickers were only getting about a dozen items per trip: typically far larger than a book. With so few items, and a warehouse that is not really a random graph, we were able to get extremely good solutions for picking. As an approximation, just try to a mock traveling salesman problem in a square grid, where you can only travel on both axis.
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It also ignores FIFO, if you are just going for the closest product. Amazon does not want to have customers returning products because they have clearly sat in a warehouse for years.
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There are in the scientific literature published algorithms that produce approximate results well in the "good enough" range, 2-5% larger than optimal, to be worthwhile. For large and small datasets, with millions of points.
Furthermore, it doesn't matter that the warehouse has millions of items, the complexity of the problem depends only on the size of the order, or the sizes of how many orders can be fit in your rolly bin.
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Re:Not all roses... (Score:4, Insightful)
Breaking News From 2107 (Score:4, Funny)
Everything is on 23 pairs of rows. The tips of the 23 rows of two warehouses break off intermittently, and circulate freely on the roadways disguised as traffic.
If any two sets of 23 show up in a fulfillment center parking lot and collide, a new fulfillment center is 'conceived', and 'gestates' for a few seasons before making a the shortest possible journey to a new location, where it starts doin' its thang'. A shocking amount of the row storage is metadata, such that a warehouse query fails outright or returns a product at roughly ludicrous speed. "Yeah, it's kind of a b-tree on Brawndo," said Dr. Joey "TT" Torvalds-Tridgell, the 800lb Brain of Amazon.
In other news, Walmart President Sanger is seeking to legalize the abortion of this burgeoning threat, saying that wanton murder, too, is a form of capitalism.
How can this work? (Score:3)
Since there's no organizational scheme, I assume that the human workers have to be told turn by turn where to go? That for anything but an item that they picked up recently, a human worker would need to be told where exactly to go to pick up the nearest item X. And even if one of the human workers did remember the last place they saw X, that spot probably is not the closest instance of X. This kind of storage scheme means that the human workers are simply meat waldos serving the computer software that runs the place.
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It works great (Score:5, Interesting)
Since there's no organizational scheme, I assume that the human workers have to be told turn by turn where to go?
There is an organizational scheme, it's just not by by product and workers will be told where to go regardless of what storage system the company uses. I implemented a version of this about 10 years ago in our warehouse for an auction company I owned. Basically you build a warehouse with identifiers on the shelving system. Then you assign a random and (this is the important bit) uniformly distributed code to each box/pallet/SKU that you store. You can't tell where a product is by the product, you have to look up the location in the computer but after that it's easy to find. This system works really well when you have a wide array of rapidly changing merchandise that you can't predict arrival times or quantities for. Amazon would be a great fit for a warehousing system like this.
This kind of storage scheme means that the human workers are simply meat waldos serving the computer software that runs the place.
That's true for pretty much all warehouses regardless of organizational scheme. Once you get to a warehouse of any size you have to have a computer to direct where to find merchandise to pick to an order. Even if the worker knows where to get it they still will need direction from the computer on quantities to pick.
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You think this is bad ? Then take a look at the future: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BWY8uFlteIM [youtube.com]
Now that is a meat waldo.
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This kind of storage scheme means that the human workers are simply meat waldos serving the computer software that runs the place.
Before that they simply served the warehouse manager with his ledger. I think you over stating impact this has on the job role of they typical picker.
I'm next! (Score:2)
chaos? (Score:2)
Chaos was the cool thing back in the 90s, amirite?
They've been doing this since the beginning (Score:2)
They've been doing "random shelving" of their items since their very first fulfillment center that wasn't Jeff Bezos's garage. It isn't particularly new, revolutionary, or a big secret.
I'm not saying it's not interesting (Score:2)
I'm not saying it's not an interesting, non-intuitive way of shelving goods. (At least its non-intuitive if you don't design DC's for a living) What I am saying is that it's not "the true key to Amazon's long-term success" like the summary stated. It wouldn't be an exaggeration to state that if Amazon had decided to organize their goods like a library, they'd have gone bankrupt a VERY long time ago. Pretty much EVERY retail-order DC of any size shelves goods this way, and has done so for quite some time
True key to success (Score:5, Insightful)
Barcode bugger-ups: big problem. (Score:5, Interesting)
The second package had the same book in it.
So did the third.
It turns out that for some reason, possibly because they were part of the same product line, these two books were assigned the same Amazon-internal barcode. Because of this I never got the book that was ordered, but instead ended with two copies of the book that was mistakenly sent, and a credit for the cost of the original order.
What might have been an easily remedied issue, had storage followed a logical pattern and the fulfillment person given enough autonomy to detect and solve the problem, ended up taking months to get to the bottom of.
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I have seen warehouses where the first step in the shipping station is a verification of the contents, including a picture. I guess Amazon thinks this step is too expensive for what it's worth?
Two Day Shipping Prime (Score:2)
flash drive (Score:2)
So Amazon storage works as a flash drive.
Chaotic works sometimes (Score:3)
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No, that's not really that hard.
A chaotic system works fine; just add the restrictions capability. For example, the programmers/operations engineers involved get told: Foodstuffs can't be next to potential toxins. A flag is added (let's call it FDA1) across the board to all foodstuffs, another to the things they can't be near (FDA2). Then, the chaotic system declares a region of the warehouse FDA1-ok and another FDA2-ok. Takes a split-second more to allocate a new bin, including having built-in 'grow re
Link to photos (Score:4, Informative)
The article slideshow isn[t working for me. Some photos from an Amazon warehouse were posted on reddit the other day. Here are those photos: http://imgur.com/a/q1WIO [imgur.com].
To be contrasted with Kiva-powered warehouses (Score:2)
I just read this article about how GAP and Zappos are using Kiva robots in their warehouses which makes a nice contrast. http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2009/01/retailrobots/ [wired.com]
As far as I can tell the Kiva warehouses could probably be said to use some form of cahotic storage too. The advantages they cite to using robots are: much higher productivity, less walking for employees, safer and more ergonomic environment, less 'shrinkage' (theft) due to most of the warehouse being robot-only, lower power usage d
slideshow pictures for non-working browsers: (Score:4, Informative)
http://s1.ibtimes.com/sites/www.ibtimes.com/files/styles/article_slideshow_slide/public/2012/11/29/amazon-warehouse-1.jpg [ibtimes.com]
http://s1.ibtimes.com/sites/www.ibtimes.com/files/styles/article_slideshow_slide/public/2012/11/29/amazon-warehouse-2.jpg [ibtimes.com]
http://s1.ibtimes.com/sites/www.ibtimes.com/files/styles/article_slideshow_slide/public/2012/11/29/amazon-warehouse-3.jpg [ibtimes.com]
http://s1.ibtimes.com/sites/www.ibtimes.com/files/styles/article_slideshow_slide/public/2012/11/29/amazon-warehouse-4.jpg [ibtimes.com]
http://s1.ibtimes.com/sites/www.ibtimes.com/files/styles/article_slideshow_slide/public/2012/11/29/amazon-warehouse-5.jpg [ibtimes.com]
http://s1.ibtimes.com/sites/www.ibtimes.com/files/styles/article_slideshow_slide/public/2012/11/29/amazon-warehouse-6.jpg [ibtimes.com]
http://s1.ibtimes.com/sites/www.ibtimes.com/files/styles/article_slideshow_slide/public/2012/11/29/amazon-warehouse-7.jpg [ibtimes.com]
http://s1.ibtimes.com/sites/www.ibtimes.com/files/styles/article_slideshow_slide/public/2012/11/29/amazon-warehouse-8.jpg [ibtimes.com]
http://s1.ibtimes.com/sites/www.ibtimes.com/files/styles/article_slideshow_slide/public/2012/11/29/amazon-warehouse-9.jpg [ibtimes.com]
http://s1.ibtimes.com/sites/www.ibtimes.com/files/styles/article_slideshow_slide/public/2012/11/29/amazon-warehouse-10.jpg [ibtimes.com]
http://s1.ibtimes.com/sites/www.ibtimes.com/files/styles/article_slideshow_slide/public/2012/11/29/amazon-warehouse-11.jpg [ibtimes.com]
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A friend of mine has a small business selling specialized shoes...Has anyone dealt with such systems? Any recomendations? Many thanks.
Have you given Bundy a try?
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Could you give a link? I couldn't find it. Thanks!
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al_Bundy [wikipedia.org]
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A friend of mine has a small business selling specialized shoes, and needs a new inventory system. Quickbooks just doesn't cut the load and such large inventories. Ideally, it should be an open source solution, either LAN or web-based, with very comprehensive inventory management and customer relationship management, barcode reading/printing, possibly unique ID (serial number) generation, and ideally some accounting/quickbooks integration.
I don't see what your friend would benefit from open source in this case. How about Microsoft Dynamics NAV?
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That was step 1. We're at the end of step 2 now. Run razor thin margins while continuing to grow and build efficiency while fighting taxation of online sales. Step 3 is support taxes knowing that your potential competition has either been eliminated or sufficiently crippled, and this will keep them that way. Step 4 will be raise prices and profit.
As The Register pointed out yesterday, thanks to AWS/S3/etc, Amazon may very well have the rest of the world paying its datacenter costs now.