This explains a lot of the strange engineering I've seen from Amazon over the past several years. Like why there's almost no coherence among the AWS services,

This explains a lot of the strange engineering I've seen from Amazon over the past several years. Like why there's almost no coherence among the AWS services, or why the error-handling and documentation is never up to par, or why they're happy to throw away a library and replace it with another one with a completely different interface. Amazon doesn't need these things! I will say that this behavior has generated absolutely zero loyalty in me. The only reason I use any Amazon service today is because I made that decision in the past, and it's more work to change. They look to me like the Blackberry of web services right now. It works, and they have millions of customers, but they simply don't comprehend how much better the experience could be.