Good Idea! Now find a better one.

Previously, we argued that the Cisco-Athletics stadium deal was more likely to constrain the stadium of the future than enable it.

Cisco’s creation of the infrastructure and, at first blush, their desire to build the applications that run on that infrastructure may create an environment that is the exact opposite of the vibrant Silicon Valley Cisco hails from.

Consider a new service just released by Amazon, the Elastic Compute Cloud. This is a service that affords you access to vast amounts of computing power but only costs you according to what you actually use. It’s computing on demand.

With this Elastic Compute Cloud, or EC2, Amazon is providing infrastructure just as Cisco will for Cisco Field and has done for the Internet. And perhaps what is most interesting, is Jeff Bezos’ perspective on offering this service.

His company isn’t building the applications that run on EC2 or constraining what applications can run through partnerships. Talking with Michael Arrington on TalkCruch, Jeff Bezos said:

One of the things thats coming up in some of the beta users is they do want 700 computers for an hour because what they want to do is write applications that stress test their other applications…One of the things that I love to see when we release something like this is we always have a bunch of ideas about how people are going to use it - it’s great when it turns out that people are using it for something entirely different. It’s awesome.

Put all of Amazon’s webservices together and they’ll soon have a profitable piece of thousands of powerful online and offline businesses both large and small. Amazon is extending the reach of their infrastructure to get a piece of the backend of other businesses - profiting from and enabling their success.

And this is exactly what Cisco has done in producing high-speed networking equipment for networks all over the world.

The key is, what other people do with infrastructure is what makes that infrastructure so valuable.

Coming at this from a different angle, consider Scott Karp’s comments on the business of producing content:

Can anyone think of a content business — meaning a company that produces original content — that has scaled dramatically in recent years? I can’t. Look at the businesses that have scaled — Google, MySpace, YouTube — all platforms for content, but not producers of content.

Google doesn’t make its money by making web pages to search. MySpace doesn’t make its money by making profile pages online. YouTube doesn’t make its money by creating videos. And Jeff Bezos isn’t driving Amazon to make money from selling applications that run on their Compute Cloud or their other web services.

They all generate revenue through other peoples’ use of their infrastructure and they all stand to benefit when those people find new, ingenious uses.

So it is with Cisco and the Internet. So it could be with Cisco and Cisco Field.