4 ms·

The rate at which Amazon is rolling out products is nothing short of dizzying. Reminds me of Google before Larry came back and retook the reigns. Inevitably the

The rate at which Amazon is rolling out products is nothing short of dizzying. Reminds me of Google before Larry came back and retook the reigns. Inevitably they will come to a point where they start shutting down a subset of their enormous product line. It was one thing to have google wave or reader dropped, but when amazon kills some of these lines it'll affect people in real ways. And it will happen. Here is for hoping they eventually focus on making their products better instead of constantly making new ones. Even look at AWS. I would struggle to name 80% of the services under that umbrella in under a minute.

aed 12y ago
You may be right, I agree that it's bound to happen at some point. I think one big difference is Amazon is rolling out revenue-producing products and Google was rolling out non-revenue-producing "experiments."
- hemancuso 12y ago
  I agree with that to a point. But unless these products are profitable it doesn't really matter if they produce revenue. Folk long-argued that it was valuable for Google to have all of these free products because it kept them in the Google ecosystem. They were spending more time on Google, which had real value. The problem is the cost that comes with lack of focus. Exploding headcount. Unclear corporate vision. When only a few of your products make nearly all of your money, why spend a bunch of energy on a lot of things that lose money, or make practically no profit? I'd love to see Amazon spend real effort on making AWS easier to use [for people who are not deeply steeped in AWS already, it's hard]. For the love of God, I can't believe AWS console still makes you globally switch on region for everything. Can't there just big a dashboard that lets you see and control, ya know, everything? It's things like that. Things that have been bad for a long time. Instead of pushing out redshift or cognitio or zocalo or workspaces or elastic transcoder, how about they make AWS as a whole a better product? Something easier to user. Something more consistent.
  - taeric 12y ago
    Aren't most of Amazon's services profitable in isolation? I always thought the problem was they took those profits and immediately spent them investing in new services.
  - twistedpair 12y ago
    > I'd love to see Amazon spend real effort on making AWS easier to use [for people who are not deeply steeped in AWS already, it's hard]. That's the beauty of the API. There are already various vendors that do just this on top of it. The funny thing is, if you're a big guy too, say 10K instances, you also need to use 3rd party tools since the AWS UI can't handle that case either. But since everything is an API call you can build your business by making AWS better for hire. Then again, better hope your idea isn't killed off overnight when AWS does add it as a new feature.
    - hemancuso 12y ago
      You say all of this like it's a good thing!
nemesisj 12y ago
The difference between the Google scenario and Amazon is that from what I can see, Amazon makes money on almost all of the products it's rolling out vs. Google not really directly making money out of most of its products.
- djrogers 12y ago
  If Amazon made money off 'almost all' of the products it's rolling out, it wouldn't be posting record losses every quarter and attributing it to those money-losing products.
  - npinguy 12y ago
    That is because any new product has an upfront fixed cost in investment. Amazon is investing like crazy into growth, and as a result all their new costs are new products. Quarter to quarter their loss numbers are so low that it seems like they would only need to slow down their growth by a couple of percent and they would be instantly profitable. Not a bad spot to be in.
  - res0nat0r 12y ago
    They are "losing money" because they keep reinvesting all of their profits to facilitate all of these new products they keep turning out, and the market doesn't like it.
    - elsewhen 12y ago
      $150B market cap. 800%+ cumulative gain over last ten years. I think the market is liking Amazon's strategy thus far.

aed 12y ago

You may be right, I agree that it's bound to happen at some point. I think one big difference is Amazon is rolling out revenue-producing products and Google was rolling out non-revenue-producing "experiments."

hemancuso 12y ago
I agree with that to a point. But unless these products are profitable it doesn't really matter if they produce revenue. Folk long-argued that it was valuable for Google to have all of these free products because it kept them in the Google ecosystem. They were spending more time on Google, which had real value. The problem is the cost that comes with lack of focus. Exploding headcount. Unclear corporate vision. When only a few of your products make nearly all of your money, why spend a bunch of energy on a lot of things that lose money, or make practically no profit? I'd love to see Amazon spend real effort on making AWS easier to use [for people who are not deeply steeped in AWS already, it's hard]. For the love of God, I can't believe AWS console still makes you globally switch on region for everything. Can't there just big a dashboard that lets you see and control, ya know, everything? It's things like that. Things that have been bad for a long time. Instead of pushing out redshift or cognitio or zocalo or workspaces or elastic transcoder, how about they make AWS as a whole a better product? Something easier to user. Something more consistent.
- taeric 12y ago
  Aren't most of Amazon's services profitable in isolation? I always thought the problem was they took those profits and immediately spent them investing in new services.
- twistedpair 12y ago
  > I'd love to see Amazon spend real effort on making AWS easier to use [for people who are not deeply steeped in AWS already, it's hard]. That's the beauty of the API. There are already various vendors that do just this on top of it. The funny thing is, if you're a big guy too, say 10K instances, you also need to use 3rd party tools since the AWS UI can't handle that case either. But since everything is an API call you can build your business by making AWS better for hire. Then again, better hope your idea isn't killed off overnight when AWS does add it as a new feature.
  - hemancuso 12y ago
    You say all of this like it's a good thing!

nemesisj 12y ago

The difference between the Google scenario and Amazon is that from what I can see, Amazon makes money on almost all of the products it's rolling out vs. Google not really directly making money out of most of its products.

djrogers 12y ago
If Amazon made money off 'almost all' of the products it's rolling out, it wouldn't be posting record losses every quarter and attributing it to those money-losing products.
- npinguy 12y ago
  That is because any new product has an upfront fixed cost in investment. Amazon is investing like crazy into growth, and as a result all their new costs are new products. Quarter to quarter their loss numbers are so low that it seems like they would only need to slow down their growth by a couple of percent and they would be instantly profitable. Not a bad spot to be in.
- res0nat0r 12y ago
  They are "losing money" because they keep reinvesting all of their profits to facilitate all of these new products they keep turning out, and the market doesn't like it.
  - elsewhen 12y ago
    $150B market cap. 800%+ cumulative gain over last ten years. I think the market is liking Amazon's strategy thus far.