I think it has a lot to do with incentives and company culture. Disclaimer: I’m not working right now and taking a lengthy break after a long career at Amazon,

I think it has a lot to do with incentives and company culture. Disclaimer: I’m not working right now and taking a lengthy break after a long career at Amazon, so here’s my experience. And I bounced around the non-AWS side of the company for over 10 years, so I’m not speaking to AWS. Amazon will never make a product anywhere near Apple quality, especially when it comes to fit and finish. Amazon hires a lot of MBAs, fresh out of college, and Amazon’s culture around OP1/OP2 forces organizations to justify their funding and head count. Add in the perverse promotion incentives, and you get outcomes where the company tries 100 different things at any given point in time, and tries to see what will stick. There’s never a holistic vision on delivering one product and making it “insanely great”. Instead, it’s a mess of myriad different things, developed by burned out engineers, layers of management, and MBAs who have all kinds of ideas, though a single 30 minute meeting will provide enough proof these people don’t use their own products. It’s these endless amounts of processes and “mechanisms”, as Amazon calls them, that you get cringy and ridiculous features such as Alexa trying to sell you garbage when all you wanted to know was the weather. The MBAs are under the gun to deliver “something”, and now you can add in the stress of people having families, depending on their Amazon employment to stay in the country, not to mention the cut throat culture, it’s all a recipe for cheap plastic or things that no one actually needs. Amazon has a document-writing focused culture, as opposed to using Powerpoint. You’ll find tons and tons of PR FAQs, or in some organizations, product oriented “North Star” vision documents. There’s plenty of corporate speak with phrases like, “delighting customers”, even though it’s some half baked service or product with dizzying amounts of complexity to justify promotions.