Amazon will soon be operating at a scale that no other company in history has reached. There is a good chance they will run into operational challenges that no

Amazon will soon be operating at a scale that no other company in history has reached. There is a good chance they will run into operational challenges that no one else has faced before. Think: challenges on which there is zero academic research because no one has studied them in the past. Think: challenges for which there are no known solutions. Simply chanting that "software is scalable" and "software has zero incremental cost" doesn't solve those kinds of challenges. Multiple geographic groups, business units, physical locations, data centers, software systems, managers, and employees, by their very physical nature, are able to communicate and coordinate with each other only in statistically noisy ways that are ultimately constrained by the Laws of Thermodynamics. These laws, to put it mildly, impose hard limits of what any company can do with information and energy. I wonder when and whether Amazon will start running into these limits.