• BusinessWeek , Friday, November 3, 2006 12:45 PM

Amazon.com CEO Jeff Bezos has a brand new idea, but Wall Street is concerned that the online retailer should be minding the store instead of venturing off in new directions. What's the big idea? Called the Elastic Compute Cloud, the article says it offers a Web technology whose "cheap, raw computing power could be tapped on the Internet just like electricity." The launch is scheduled for Nov. 8 at the Web 2.0 conference.

Bezos wants to transform Amazon into a 21st-century digital utility; he wants to be the pipes that run your Internet business. It's as if Wal-Mart announced it would no longer sell goods, just its supply chain and logistics systems. In theory, this means Amazon is looking to move in on the turf of companies like Akamai and IBM. Amazon has tons of unused computing capacity it wants to license out, including data storage on its disk drives and "even some of the millions of lines of software code it has written to coordinate all that."

Wall Street is skeptical, but techies are "wowed" by the plan. The Street thinks Amazon may be paying a visit to the Ghost of Christmas past by taking its eyes off its core business, while techies' VC funds are already bidding behind the scenes to grab pieces of the big A's unused computer systems.

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