Determining Operating Systems and Software Applications

Determining Operating Systems and Software Applications BIS/320 Amazon has made a business of selling a variety media types while also making the reselling of the same media an attractive option. What better way to regain in part what you spent on media interests than to resell it and have money to put towards the next interest. As of 2004 Amazon began running the Linux operating system across the board. Amazon then became one of the largest and well known companies running the Linux operating system.As one of the largest ecommerce centered businesses with a large global customer base with high expectations of constant expansion. Currently, it is known that Amazon is running Linux servers â€Å"Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), had close to half-a-million servers already running on a Red Hat Linux variant (Vaughn, 2012). † At this time â€Å"Amazon has never officially said what it's running as EC2's base operating system, it's generally accepted that it's a customized ve rsion of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL). (Vaughn, 2012)† In addition Amazon uses Xen hypervisor as host to the Linux system for virtual machines.Solaris; OpenSolaris; FreeBSD and NetBSD and Windows 2003 and 2008 are additional virtual machine instances. The multiple operating services that Amazon is currently using assist with meeting the high demand of users that browse and purchase from their sites. In using their cloud technology, EC2, it is also possible that not all information will be stored at any specific location, but is easily accessible to anyone within the company to access it. With Linux gaining popularity this will ultimately become beneficial to Amazon in their continual global expansion goals.Hardware are electrical mechanisms that is physically connected to your computer such as an electronic components and related gadgetry that input, process, output, and store data according to instructions encoded in computer programs or software (Kroenke, 2012). The Amazo n-to-buyer operating system is quite simple and uses a variety of input and output in comparison with various office based business. A difference will be the amount that is actually used verses an output or input device. The individual consumer at home using their computer will initiate the process by registering as a user , followed by inputting heir shipping and billing information which will be stored by the website’s servers. The consumer’s computer is considered the input device and the server is a storage device. Once a purchase has occurred the website will use the stored information to input the customer’s credit card information into a card reader which automatically debits the funds from the customer’s account. Card readers and scanners are widely used input devices (Kroenke, 2012). Most output devices are located at various individual merchants that use Amazon to sell their goods. Each having a database that show pending orders inputted through Amazon.These merchants will use their printers to document the order and locate the desired merchandise. Once the merchandise is located, information is then sent to the shipping department. Versatile shipping options like UPS, Fed Ex, or the U. S. Postal service are available and output devices will print things such as the bill of lading; the inventory of the packaged goods and the shipping labels with the previously entered customer’s shipping information on it. Once delivered, the merchandise is scanned via another input device called a barcode scanner.This information is then relayed to the merchant who reports a successful delivery to Amazon. A confirmation email will be sent to the customer confirming their transaction is complete. If desired the consumer can give their input on the Amazon experience via their home based computer. Amazon’s Founder and Chiefy Executive Office outlines the companies business objectives as: Increase Sales, promote the brand, creat e a loyal customer base and fiscal strength. By expanding each operational goal its gives a better understand on how the operating systems contribute to Amazon’s objective.Sales can be defined as making sure the customer gets what he wants, but also feeding in to the psychology of impulse buying. Impulse purchases can be promoted through an application Amazon employs, called the Dash. When conducting a search for a particular item the results of that search offer not only the item itself, but also similar items. There is also a feature that shows the customer what other customers, who have order this particular item of interest, have also purchased. Promotional brand occurred during Amazon’s Kindle was launched.In 2005 Bezos believed that â€Å"every book ever written in any language will be available (to the enduser) in less than sixty seconds†. (Bezos, 2009). The edict issued that the demarcation between Kindle, the device and Kindle the service be seamless to the enduser. In the four years that followed, sales have exceeded budgetary expectations. The e-mail feedback from customers is strongly positive with 26% of customer e-mails containing the word â€Å"love†. Amazon has positioned itself prominently on search engine sites so a pattern match of only a few letters will bring Amazon to the forefront.Amazon itself has become a search engine of sorts, which many people use for pricing items being considered for purchase. The brand has made Amazon not only a shopping site, but also a reference guide for benchmarking other purchases. Bezos defines customer loyalty as encouraging his staff to be â€Å"obsessed over our customers†. The computer applications used for tracking purchases as well as shipping allows customer service representatives to assist dissatisfied customers and get them to a satisfactory result. References Kroenke, D. M. (2012). MIS Essentials (2nd ed. ). : Pearson Education Thorp J. Feb 99), The Information Paradox, Retrieved from http://www. amazon. com/Information-Paradox-Realizing-Business-Technology/dp Vaughn, S. (2012, March 16). Amazon's EC2 cloud is made up of almost half-a-million servers. ZDNet. Retrieved from http://www. zdnet. com/blog/open-source/amazon-ec2-cloud-is-made-up-of-almost-half-a-million-linux-servers/10620 | Operating Systems| Horizontal-Market Applications| Vertical-Market Applications| One-of-a-Kind Market Applications| Example| Linnux, Eucalyptus(cloud), OpenStack(cloud),EC2 and Red Hat Linux†¦ for starters| | | | Description of how it is used| | | | |Typical user| Amazon draws its users from anyone that can operate a computer and has an internet connection. | | | | Advantages| Easy to use; large amounts of information can be accessed without incorporating mass amounts of storage on a single server with cloud technology; accessibility to data from any location with cloud technology. | | | | Disadvantages| Even though Amazon continues to hire developers b andwidth is still and issue. People lose data. With such a broad base of people with the ability to browse and purchase products it poses a security issue regarding