Conventional wisdom suggests a discussion of the most exciting large web company isn't worth having. Just check out ticker symbol GOOG (693.00) to learn all you need to know. The combined stock price of YHOO (26.81) and AMZN (90.56) barely account for 1/6th of Google. This has no bearing on their relative value or success going forward, of course, but it may be a good measure of present conventional wisdom. Stocks tend to move during or after widespread success, meaning the above share prices might be an accurate ranking on the "what have you done for me lately" scale.
But the amazing part about living in 2007 is that surprises lurk around every corner. Technology is like a food-fight: it starts out with two or three loudmouths tossing pickles at each other and before you know it the entire cafeteria is at arms, rifling off rounds of mustard slathered Vienna sausages. It doesn't matter what resources are available to you or how well you aim, eventually the likelihood of lobbing a Cheez-It into your opponent's forehead is very high.
Success can find it's victim at any moment. Amazon may have touched off a new era with the Kindle release, just as Google did with text ads. One can criticize Kindle over usability or interface flaws, but it still shows that Amazon is thinking ahead in big ways. As they did with their Simple Storage Service, Elastic Computing Cloud, Mechanical Turk, and other web developer services. Not only that, but they continue to innovate in retail sales, which gives them a healthy, efficient resource to draw upon for these side-projects.
Google is similarly positioned with text and other advertising supplying their boundless financial resources. After all, at both companies relatively little cost results from operating their core businesses. Amazon has suppliers, warehouses, and robots to maintain and Google needs a bazillion servers, but these seem like tiny expenses relative to their sales volume.
But I have to go with Amazon on this one. I like the fact that they're basically a hybrid of old and new economies and they demonstrate it daily (Amazon MP3, Unbox). In some ways Google may be too much of a new economy company. I imagine a day in the Googleplex to be like working for Hank Scorpio at the Globex Corporation and the web is littered with interesting anecdotes of what life is like inside the company.
These ranking discussions are usually pointless, but I find this topic fascinating. Today's Internet companies, especially the "Web 2.0" types, are supposed to blow off the press. To not rank high and live under the radar. Basically be indifferent. It feels perverse to discuss them in juvenile terms usually reserved for debates over superheros and running backs. The discussion remains pointless because no one can predict the future (Google is working on that), but thinking in these terms did highlight nuances I hadn't considered before.
I haven't mentioned Apple or Yahoo, both of which I adore, and several other big web companies. I'll leave those discussions for the comments or another post.