Amazon 2012: What the Future May Hold for the Web’s Largest Retailer

For Amazon, it’s going to be hard to top 2011. After all, this was the year the gargantuan online retailer launched a cloud storage service, opened the doors on its own Appstore, and released a tablet, the Kindle Fire, that happens to be selling like crazy.

Looking at the bigger picture, this was the year Amazon moved to unify its several disparate services into a full-fledged platform in its own right. The site — though it’s not just a site anymore, is it? — already has a massive user base, and now its services are slowly turning more and more of them into something resembling loyal customers, or if Amazon’s lucky, “members.”

Although the company has momentum, it’s in danger of tripping over obstacles on the road ahead. Amazon has a presence in so many digital markets now, it’s easy to lose count, which means it’s competing in one form or another with pretty much every major technology company. From Google and Apple to Barnes & Noble and Netflix, Amazon has a lot of top-caliber enemies, which says a lot about how far the company has come.
What does 2012 hold for the company that businesses turn to for cheap cloud services, writers turn to for self-publishing, and everyone turns to for a cheap gift for mom? Here are Mashable‘s predictions for Amazon in 2012.

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source article: mashable.com
source image: mailware.com