Microsoft Takes Aim at the Ubiquitous Amazon Marketplace

Amazon is generally thought of as an unstoppable behemoth, pretty much dominating the online retail industry while also investing heavily in digital streaming and original content, not to mention its cloud infrastructure service, Amazon Web Services. The company has come a long way from the late 90s, when Jeff Bezos would personally run to the post office to ship out orders of books.  

It seems like Amazon has its fingerprints on almost every area of life, but that hasn’t discouraged competitors —  specifically Microsoft, which this week announced a new service that will let brands create detailed personalized product web pages with room for customer ratings and reviews. Microsoft, of course, also competes with Amazon in the cloud space with its own cloud service, Azure.

Microsoft is banking on the fact that online retailers won’t want to use Amazon services and effectively give money to a competitor. Whether Microsoft can make a dent in the ubiquitous Amazon marketplace remains to be seen.