If you need to buy a lawn rake, you won't find it at Amazon.com. Not anymore. The online store realized a couple of years ago that large, low-cost items are not worth the effort. "Big and cheap isn't effective," Jeff Bezos, the online store's founder, told MIT's annual Emerging Technologies conference this morning. Big and expensive is fine. "We can do a thriving business in table saws." In a keynote pitch and then Q&A with Jason Pontin, editor-in-chief of Technology Review, the event's organizer, Bezos introduced Amazon's newest product line: Itself.

Bezos is courting developers and young businesses to buy Web storage and back-end computing power from Amazon, which has invested more than $2 billion over the last decade in infrastructure. Now, for a fee, start-ups can take advantage of the Web operation's huge scale and capacity. "We want to open up everything that we do well," he said. "If we do something poorly, we will suffer privately." Amazon is really courting everybody, even the tiniest start-ups: The lowest bill incurred for services that he knew of, Bezos said, is 18 cents, botched moments later as 17 cents by trade reporter asking about the service's profitability. That's just an amusing low-end example, Bezos explained.

Subtly channeling Einstein, Amazon's marketing materials explain the storage system "should be made as simple as possible (but no simpler)." The company was also a major sponsor of the event.

[Photo copyright Amazon.com]