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> Amazon’s AWS strategy sprang from the same approach that made the company successful in the first place I'd argue that Amazon isn't a successful company, the

> Amazon’s AWS strategy sprang from the same approach that made the company successful in the first place I'd argue that Amazon isn't a successful company, they are a popular company with a few large successes surrounded by decaying and decrepit failures that won't die. But then again I'm biased. As far as Amazon's AWS strategy, I can't comment (I worked in the retail business side). But I can comment on a relatively small aspect of management that I witnessed. At one point in time I had a very strong need for PostGIS, and I lamented on an internal email list about AWS not having a Postgres version of RDS. I received an email directly from Raju Gulabani, VP of databases in AWS. He scheduled an appointment with me, him, and two product managers. He asked me pointed questions about why I wanted Postgres over the other options, how I would be using it, what extensions I wanted, and what features were important to me. He thanked me for my time, and less than a year later it was released to the public. In the retail business side, I never had more than 2 minutes at a time with someone at the director level, and not once had I spoken to someone at the VP level. Literally zero communication from the bottom up, everything was top down. Whether AWS had already been working on it or not I don't know, but they definitely took the time to hear my case, and when it was released it was almost perfectly as I had asked for. And that, IMO is waaaay more important than anything regarding the size of a team or whatever the fluff pieces have attributed.

darawk 10y ago
> I'd argue that Amazon isn't a successful company, they are a popular company with a few large successes surrounded by decaying and decrepit failures that won't die. But then again I'm biased. Couldn't you say the same thing about Google, or Microsoft? I think the point of 'success' is that your big wins outweigh your failures as determined by your revenue. Is it not? Creating the largest retailer in the world and the largest cloud services platform in the world seem like two pretty big wins. Either one on its own would be an extremely successful company IMO.
- saosebastiao 10y ago
  >Couldn't you say the same thing about Google, or Microsoft? I think the point of 'success' is that your big wins outweigh your failures as determined by your revenue. Is it not? Of course it is. And by that definition, Amazon isn't successful, and nowhere in the same league as Google or Amazon. Not yet, at least. They've managed to break even more or less, but it is still yet to be determined if they can become the wildly profitable company that their stock price suggests they can become. My opinion after working there is that AWS is to Alibaba as Amazon is to Yahoo.
  - zippergz 10y ago
    I think you may be confusing profit and revenue. Amazon's revenue is higher than Google's.
  - darawk 10y ago
    Their gross profit in 2015 was 35 billion. Google's was 46. The difference in final profit comes down to how much they reinvest in R&D and future growth. I'd call that the same league.
    - saosebastiao 10y ago
      You are sorely mistaken as to the difference between gross and net profit. R&D is in there, sure...along with a billion other things that also don't get accounted for in cost of goods sold.
      - darawk 10y ago
        Ya, but Amazon doesn't break it down any further than that. I'm aware that there are other things in there, but it is well known that the primary contributor to that figure is R&D.
        saosebastiao 10y ago
        Not a single programmer, manager, or any other central office employee gets paid out of COGS. There are at least 50,000 of those. Same goes for real estate costs, legal costs, etc. Servers and their operations costs might go into COGS on the AWS side, but definitely not on the retail side. Breaking out investment vs administrative cost is actually very hard to do. Is a programmer working on a new feature an R&D cost, or an administrative cost? What if it's a new service? What if it's a new product? What if it's a bug fix? What if it's a critical vulnerability? What if your programmer does all of the above at different times of the year? It's pretty much impossible to separate administrative overhead from research and development in tech companies, which is why they tend to not do it unless they are forced to. It's up to their shareholders or the SEC to force them to do it if it happens, which hasn't been the case for Amazon yet. It is assumed that they would be turning a profit if they decided to just keep the lights on and not invest in the future. That's what they tell us, and that's what we see (new product and service announcements tell us as much). What we don't know from public information is whether they would be 10% more profitable or 10,000% more profitable. And that's before we know if their investments will pay off or if they become another perpetually subsidized program like Amazon Fresh. That's why Amazon stock is considered to be a speculative investment, whereas Google and Microsoft are more in the blue chip camp. My experience and hunch tells me that Amazon stock prices are at least 50% undeserved hype.

darawk 10y ago

> I'd argue that Amazon isn't a successful company, they are a popular company with a few large successes surrounded by decaying and decrepit failures that won't die. But then again I'm biased. Couldn't you say the same thing about Google, or Microsoft? I think the point of 'success' is that your big wins outweigh your failures as determined by your revenue. Is it not? Creating the largest retailer in the world and the largest cloud services platform in the world seem like two pretty big wins. Either one on its own would be an extremely successful company IMO.

saosebastiao 10y ago
>Couldn't you say the same thing about Google, or Microsoft? I think the point of 'success' is that your big wins outweigh your failures as determined by your revenue. Is it not? Of course it is. And by that definition, Amazon isn't successful, and nowhere in the same league as Google or Amazon. Not yet, at least. They've managed to break even more or less, but it is still yet to be determined if they can become the wildly profitable company that their stock price suggests they can become. My opinion after working there is that AWS is to Alibaba as Amazon is to Yahoo.
- zippergz 10y ago
  I think you may be confusing profit and revenue. Amazon's revenue is higher than Google's.
- darawk 10y ago
  Their gross profit in 2015 was 35 billion. Google's was 46. The difference in final profit comes down to how much they reinvest in R&D and future growth. I'd call that the same league.
  - saosebastiao 10y ago
    You are sorely mistaken as to the difference between gross and net profit. R&D is in there, sure...along with a billion other things that also don't get accounted for in cost of goods sold.
    - darawk 10y ago
      Ya, but Amazon doesn't break it down any further than that. I'm aware that there are other things in there, but it is well known that the primary contributor to that figure is R&D.
      - saosebastiao 10y ago
        Not a single programmer, manager, or any other central office employee gets paid out of COGS. There are at least 50,000 of those. Same goes for real estate costs, legal costs, etc. Servers and their operations costs might go into COGS on the AWS side, but definitely not on the retail side. Breaking out investment vs administrative cost is actually very hard to do. Is a programmer working on a new feature an R&D cost, or an administrative cost? What if it's a new service? What if it's a new product? What if it's a bug fix? What if it's a critical vulnerability? What if your programmer does all of the above at different times of the year? It's pretty much impossible to separate administrative overhead from research and development in tech companies, which is why they tend to not do it unless they are forced to. It's up to their shareholders or the SEC to force them to do it if it happens, which hasn't been the case for Amazon yet. It is assumed that they would be turning a profit if they decided to just keep the lights on and not invest in the future. That's what they tell us, and that's what we see (new product and service announcements tell us as much). What we don't know from public information is whether they would be 10% more profitable or 10,000% more profitable. And that's before we know if their investments will pay off or if they become another perpetually subsidized program like Amazon Fresh. That's why Amazon stock is considered to be a speculative investment, whereas Google and Microsoft are more in the blue chip camp. My experience and hunch tells me that Amazon stock prices are at least 50% undeserved hype.