17 ms·

Remember Amazon Menus? (Scanned menus of local restaurants) Remember Amazon Movie Listings? Remember the "drone delivery"? (It makes no sense on the face of it

by MCRed 12y ago

Remember Amazon Menus? (Scanned menus of local restaurants) Remember Amazon Movie Listings? Remember the "drone delivery"? (It makes no sense on the face of it, and will never happen. But it was a big press release.) Remember Amazon scanned catalogs (eg: Mail order catalogs selling things in competition with Amazon, that you could search) Remember A9? (Amazon's answer to google, biggest mainstream mention was being used as a verb once on The OC in 2006ish.) Amazon makes dozens of "products" every year, to do press releases, to sell more Amazon stock/keep the stock price high. Most of these products never become real. Even AWS was a fake product-- they claimed it was "the infrastructure that ran Amazon.com", which was a straight up lie. (I worked for the company at the time.) All they had was S3. This product stuck to the wall and grew and became a real product over time, and so they backfilled. This strategy works for them because when something disappears (remember google glass? Yeah, it really is gone, it made no sense to begin with, but they won't admit it) .... nobody remembers it. Amazon wasted so much time on nonsense. We had 4 reorgs a year and a lot of chaos because they were constantly spinning up random teams for BS initiatives -- many of whome were nothing more than a press release. I'm not saying this is wrong (except the dishonesty about AWS)...just that Amazon announcing a product doesn't mean Amazon will be providing that product.

dkyc 12y ago
I'm surprised to see this framed so negative. What they do is essentially being the lean huge startup. They launch a product, gather initial feedback, and if it turns out promising (like AWS) they double-down. If it doesn't work, they kill it. I think it's actually nice to see such a rapid-iteration product development done by a company with that many resources and talent.
- serge2k 12y ago
  unless you are working on something and they tell you one it's done and you are getting reorged. or you just end up on a product that makes no sense, but gotta do it because someone wants it/promised it.
- stingraycharles 12y ago
  The problem is that they are using the Amazon brand to position it. This helps in gaining initial traction, but in the end damages the brand in two ways: - people do not know what to associate amazon with (it's just a bookstore, right?) - when they kill off too many project, or too many projects fail, their brand value hurts. There are other businesses that have many, many product lines, but the most succesful ones (Procter & Gamble, Unilever) almost never use their core brand name and just invent new brands. It makes it more difficult to start, but is better for your brands.
  - volaski 12y ago
    I don't believe cloud computing had anything to do with "just a bookstore" either and it turned out pretty well for them.
  - icebraining 12y ago
    But if nobody remembers them, as MCRed says, does it really hurt their brand?
    - MCRed 12y ago
      Well, they stick around for years. When I found the mail order catalogs they were 3 years old. Amazon.com runs on a lot of 20 year old code because they've never been able to upgrade it, because there's so much cruft. Amazon menusand all that create cruft. There are bugs I fixed in 2006 that came back in 2009 and are still there-- the team that I was on when I fixed them no longer exists because the people got pulled off for nonsense "products" like menus etc that eventually got canned. It's not just that they are trying things, the things they are trying take engineers out of their key talent pool-- which is pretty shallow to begin with because Amazon is a very anti-engineering company. (Really they hate engineers at the executive level.) Most of the site at this point is cruft while engineers run around chasing nonsense that will never be in production more than a year.
      - aphexairlines 12y ago
        In what way do they hate engineers?
- MCRed 12y ago
  It is a negative because Amazon doesn't have that many resources or talent. They are short on engineers. The people building things like amazon movies are being taken off of key things like product search. Bugs I fixed there were regressed in later years and are still broken-- this is key product sales bugs that are still there. The team I was on that wrote the code got dissipated away. Here's a key thing that people miss about amazon-- it is NOT a tech company. It should not be mentioned along with Google, Apple & Facebook. Amazon is a retailer, most of the employees are retailers and the whole management structure is retail guys. Not engineers. Outside of AWS there's very little engineering resources at all given what they need to do, just to maintain the core business. They're running 20 year old code that 10 years ago was crashing regularly-- eg Amazon.com going down so you can't b uy cell phones or whatever. I've worked for a lot of startups and a lot of big tech companies, like Apple, Microsoft etc. Amazon is not a tech company. If you're an engineer you should never go work there-- the management is all non-engineer types. My bosses training was to be a prison guard! He could barely handle excel but was criticizing our code. His boss was no better- a DMV reject. (literally), and all the way up to Bezos who is not an engineer either. My boss, by the way was dealing weed in the PacMed garage to other employees. The entire team left because he was such an asshole-- and he got promoted as a result! Company is pretty much a joke. I know on HN you're not allowed(?) to say negative things about big "tech" companies. I may be shadowbanned for ti, but Amazon was a terrible, TERRIBLE place to work. Microsoft had too much bureaucracy and was too "corporate" for me, but you can understand why they were the way they were-- amazon on the other hand was absolutely terrible. It's run by people who are extremely arrogant and have no regard for anybody -not investors, not suppliers, and least of all employees. It is the most employee hostile place I ever worked. All advancement is political and because of stack ranking its really easy to stab people in the back. Terrible company. (I've had a lot of jobs, worked for disorganized startups-- but the key difference is whether management gives a damn about employees or not. Amazon they don't, they're hostile, everywhere else has not been that way- even bad management is usually just incompetent, not hostile.)
  - serge2k 12y ago
    > He [Bezos] attended Princeton University, intending to study physics, but soon returned to his love of computers and graduated summa cum laude, with a Bachelor of Science in Engineering in electrical engineering and computer science http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeff_Bezos#Early_and_personal_life http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeff_Bezos#Early_and_personal_l... I guess that's not engineering though.
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
- MCRed 12y ago
  One of the Amazing things about Amazon, compared to, say Microsoft, and which has since become a huge red flag for me is the culture is very cult like. Amazon management is very adept and focosed on blowing smoke up the skirt of employees. "Today is day one!" Even the use of "door desks"-- that cost the company more money than actual desks would-- is done to perpetuate the "we're just a startup, rah rah rah" BS "Culture". Its' gross manipulation but it also results in people who buy into it being REALLY dedicated to their beliefs-- because deep down people want to believe and Amazon gives them that (even though it then turns around and abuses them.) They do this for a reason-- by having these mantras and these beliefs about the company, it makes people not believe the negatives or think the negatives don't represent the whole company.
empressplay 12y ago
This isn't really 'new' -- this has been in the pipe for a while, and they've vetted a lot of service providers so I expect that with that amount of investment in it Amazon Services is going to be around for a while. If it eats your lunch, my condolences.
flyinglizard 12y ago
Amazon drone delivery WILL happen. This will be completely disruptive to how stuff is consumed. Amazon being able to reach any point in an urban environment from its outskirts, at any time of day, within minutes and at a cost of just cents, will completely change consumption patterns (at least for existing Amazon users). Once something has such a strong financial implication, any other obstacle in its way is going to crumble (not to mention that the technology is mature enough today to perform this; the barrier is regulation, and that can change with enough money at stake).
- rplnt 12y ago
  I can't tell if this is sarcasm or not.
  - piyushpr134 12y ago
    You have been droned
  - flyinglizard 12y ago
    Dead serious. The technology is there, the economics are there - it just seems outlandish as an idea, but for no real good reason.
    - randomsearch 12y ago
      > it just seems outlandish as an idea, but for no real good reason I imagine safety and power issues, talking to friends who research drone tech.
      - wstrange 12y ago
        And payload. A drone just can't carry any significant weight.
        deleted 12y ago
        [deleted]
einrealist 12y ago
Isn't that equal to startup or seed investor culture? To me it is the only way to discover new markets or market strategies. It is the best thing Amazon can do and they have the money for these adventures. As a developer, this must be a dream environment to work in, even when only 1 idea in 10 works out.
- serge2k 12y ago
  Nope, not if you aren't coming up with the ideas.
  - shubb 12y ago
    My perception, based on hearsay, is that Amazon is a high turn over, burn out kinda place. Even recruiters say that. Doesn't mean it's true but the perception is out there.
nknighthb 12y ago
> Remember the "drone delivery"? (It makes no sense on the face of it, and will never happen. But it was a big press release.) You mean the drone delivery they're actively testing in the UK? The drone delivery they're fighting with the FAA about? The drone delivery they just testified before Congress about? They're spending an awful lot of time, money, and political capital on something that makes no sense, will never happen, and was just a press release.
- michaelt 12y ago
  When I hear "drone delivery" I hear some PR guys spending $500 on a hobby drone, carrying a trivial weight a short distance within line-of-sight of a manual operator, then we don't hear any more about it. Textbook drone delivery: http://pandodaily.com/2013/10/14/zookal-starts-world-first-delivery-by-drone-service-in-sydney/ http://pandodaily.com/2013/10/14/zookal-starts-world-first-d... Cake drone delivery: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/china/10206212/Pie-in-the-sky-Chinese-authorities-shoot-down-worlds-first-cake-drones.html http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/china/1020621... Pizza drone delivery: http://www.adweek.com/adfreak/dominos-tests-delivery-pizza-remote-controlled-drone-150259 http://www.adweek.com/adfreak/dominos-tests-delivery-pizza-r... Parcel delivery drones: http://news.cnet.com/8301-11386_3-57601531-76/drones-in-china-deliver-packages-even-a-birthday-cake/ http://news.cnet.com/8301-11386_3-57601531-76/drones-in-chin... http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/sep/25/german-dhl-launches-first-commercial-drone-delivery-service http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/sep/25/german-dhl... Beer delivery drones: http://www.billboard.com/biz/articles/news/branding/1561256/are-beer-drones-the-future-of-music-festivals-a-qa-with-darkwing http://www.billboard.com/biz/articles/news/branding/1561256/... Taco delivery drones: http://tacocopter.com/ http://tacocopter.com/ Burrito delivery drones: http://www.forbes.com/sites/tomiogeron/2012/12/17/burrito-bomber-drone-parachutes-carnitas-to-your-doorstep/ http://www.forbes.com/sites/tomiogeron/2012/12/17/burrito-bo... Sushi delivery drones: http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=y9RKXO1rr7g http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=y9RKX... Rubber shoe delivery drones: https://www.techinasia.com/crocs-japan-drone-delivery-crash/ https://www.techinasia.com/crocs-japan-drone-delivery-crash/ General delivery drones: http://matternet.us/our-vision/ http://matternet.us/our-vision/ http://www.economist.com/news/technology-quarterly/21567193-networking-enthusiasts-dream-building-drone-powered-internet-carry-objects http://www.economist.com/news/technology-quarterly/21567193-... http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/news/11210026/Drone-on-your-doorstep-UK-start-up-trials-delivery-service.html http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/news/11210026/Drone-on... http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/09/02/project_wing_google_delivery_drones/ http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/09/02/project_wing_google_... I think a certain amount of scepticism is warranted :)
the_mitsuhiko 12y ago
> Even AWS was a fake product-- they claimed it was "the infrastructure that ran Amazon.com", which was a straight up lie. (I worked for the company at the time.) All they had was S3. This product stuck to the wall and grew and became a real product over time, and so they backfilled. Citation for this lie please. Because parts of your statement here do not really make sense. For instance that S3 was at one point they only service they had.
- pja 12y ago
  I think you misunderstood: the OP is saying that S3 was the only service that Amazon was actually using internally at the time out of the initial AWS service offering, even though AWS as a whole was sold as "the infrastructure that runs Amazon". I thought AWS started with EC2 & S3? Anyone got a link to a reliable history? (Fwiw, I’ve heard the same thing the OP says elsewhere.)
  - the_mitsuhiko 12y ago
    > I think you misunderstood: the OP is saying that S3 was the only service that Amazon was actually using internally at the time out of the initial AWS service offering, even though AWS as a whole was sold as "the infrastructure that runs Amazon". I can't even find sources of such a claim at the time the first offering of AWS occurred. The claim has made that as of 2010, 100% of amazon.com traffic goes via EC2 which I believe is likely as it has been mentioned by Amazon engineers. That AWS was not built for amazon first and foremost has been said from the start. Jeff Bezos himself said early on that why only build it for themselves when they can sell it. > I thought AWS started with EC2 & S3? Anyone got a link to a reliable history? AWS's first service was SQS which launched two years before S3. EC2 launched half a year after S3. There is a bit of history here: http://jeff-barr.com/2014/08/19/my-first-12-years-at-amazon-dot-com/ http://jeff-barr.com/2014/08/19/my-first-12-years-at-amazon-...
    - justinsb 12y ago
      Do you not remember yourself how AWS was initially pitched?
dingaling 12y ago
> We had 4 reorgs a year and a lot of chaos because they were constantly spinning up random teams for BS initiatives -- many of whome were nothing more than a press release. To me, who served 15 years of corporate coding dronery for a Fortune 100 company, that sounds totally awesome. In all that time I served on three teams.
B-Con 12y ago
You make it sound like every non-existent product was a failure, at that many were press-release driven. But companies do try weird things just to see what sticks sometimes. > (remember google glass? Yeah, it really is gone, it made no sense to begin with, but they won't admit it) This is an example. Glass was clearly an experimental product to gather information. It was advertised, priced, and distributed like one. If you think it was a failure or is dead, you paid little to no attention to the life cycle. Throw something at the wall, see what happens, refine, try again. Refining the experiment or using the information to go pursue something else isn't failure. I would assume that Amazon has a similar philosophy, at least to some extent.
AndrewKemendo 12y ago
Same could be said about Google, except Google gets a dedicated userbase and then shuts the service down.
galfarragem 12y ago
"I have not failed. I've just found 10,000 ways that won't work." - Thomas A. Edison
jayvanguard 12y ago
Drones are still going: http://techcrunch.com/2015/03/30/canada-proves-fertile-ground-for-amazon-drone-delivery-tests/ http://techcrunch.com/2015/03/30/canada-proves-fertile-groun... Don't forget they started in books and now sell pretty much everything. Also, the kindle seemed to work out pretty well.
gibsonje 12y ago
Doesn't google do this same thing?...
mandeepj 12y ago
You forgot to mention Amazon fire phone but that was a real product developed over 4+ years
newobj 12y ago
I read the whole comment and wasn't sure what the point was, other than to display your still lingering AMZNPTSD? "Amazon makes dozens of "products" every year, to do press releases, to sell more Amazon stock/keep the stock price high." That's quite a leap of logic. Really thought it would have been that $90B of annual revenue that was keeping the stock high.
cek 12y ago
http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/mar/30/amazon-tests-drones-secret-site-canada-us-faa http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/mar/30/amazon-tes...
thaumaturgy 12y ago
The drone delivery at least seems to still be a major ongoing effort on Amazon's part: http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/mar/30/amazon-tests-drones-secret-site-canada-us-faa http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/mar/30/amazon-tes... Amazon's been making a lot of press lately leaning hard on the FAA to shorten up their paperwork lifecycle for outdoor testing in the US, as well as eliminating the regulatory requirement for line-of-sight flight. If drone delivery is a dead project, Amazon doesn't know it yet.
giarc 12y ago
Look up GOOG-411 which was a service they used to collect speech and language data in addition to providing services to the public. I'm sure people had a similar opinion to yours about GOOG-411, but it was incredibly valuable them. Sometimes companies disguise data collection as a service.

by MCRed 12y ago

dkyc 12y ago

I'm surprised to see this framed so negative. What they do is essentially being the lean huge startup. They launch a product, gather initial feedback, and if it turns out promising (like AWS) they double-down. If it doesn't work, they kill it. I think it's actually nice to see such a rapid-iteration product development done by a company with that many resources and talent.

serge2k 12y ago
unless you are working on something and they tell you one it's done and you are getting reorged. or you just end up on a product that makes no sense, but gotta do it because someone wants it/promised it.
stingraycharles 12y ago
The problem is that they are using the Amazon brand to position it. This helps in gaining initial traction, but in the end damages the brand in two ways: - people do not know what to associate amazon with (it's just a bookstore, right?) - when they kill off too many project, or too many projects fail, their brand value hurts. There are other businesses that have many, many product lines, but the most succesful ones (Procter & Gamble, Unilever) almost never use their core brand name and just invent new brands. It makes it more difficult to start, but is better for your brands.
- volaski 12y ago
  I don't believe cloud computing had anything to do with "just a bookstore" either and it turned out pretty well for them.
- icebraining 12y ago
  But if nobody remembers them, as MCRed says, does it really hurt their brand?
  - MCRed 12y ago
    Well, they stick around for years. When I found the mail order catalogs they were 3 years old. Amazon.com runs on a lot of 20 year old code because they've never been able to upgrade it, because there's so much cruft. Amazon menusand all that create cruft. There are bugs I fixed in 2006 that came back in 2009 and are still there-- the team that I was on when I fixed them no longer exists because the people got pulled off for nonsense "products" like menus etc that eventually got canned. It's not just that they are trying things, the things they are trying take engineers out of their key talent pool-- which is pretty shallow to begin with because Amazon is a very anti-engineering company. (Really they hate engineers at the executive level.) Most of the site at this point is cruft while engineers run around chasing nonsense that will never be in production more than a year.
    - aphexairlines 12y ago
      In what way do they hate engineers?
MCRed 12y ago
It is a negative because Amazon doesn't have that many resources or talent. They are short on engineers. The people building things like amazon movies are being taken off of key things like product search. Bugs I fixed there were regressed in later years and are still broken-- this is key product sales bugs that are still there. The team I was on that wrote the code got dissipated away. Here's a key thing that people miss about amazon-- it is NOT a tech company. It should not be mentioned along with Google, Apple & Facebook. Amazon is a retailer, most of the employees are retailers and the whole management structure is retail guys. Not engineers. Outside of AWS there's very little engineering resources at all given what they need to do, just to maintain the core business. They're running 20 year old code that 10 years ago was crashing regularly-- eg Amazon.com going down so you can't b uy cell phones or whatever. I've worked for a lot of startups and a lot of big tech companies, like Apple, Microsoft etc. Amazon is not a tech company. If you're an engineer you should never go work there-- the management is all non-engineer types. My bosses training was to be a prison guard! He could barely handle excel but was criticizing our code. His boss was no better- a DMV reject. (literally), and all the way up to Bezos who is not an engineer either. My boss, by the way was dealing weed in the PacMed garage to other employees. The entire team left because he was such an asshole-- and he got promoted as a result! Company is pretty much a joke. I know on HN you're not allowed(?) to say negative things about big "tech" companies. I may be shadowbanned for ti, but Amazon was a terrible, TERRIBLE place to work. Microsoft had too much bureaucracy and was too "corporate" for me, but you can understand why they were the way they were-- amazon on the other hand was absolutely terrible. It's run by people who are extremely arrogant and have no regard for anybody -not investors, not suppliers, and least of all employees. It is the most employee hostile place I ever worked. All advancement is political and because of stack ranking its really easy to stab people in the back. Terrible company. (I've had a lot of jobs, worked for disorganized startups-- but the key difference is whether management gives a damn about employees or not. Amazon they don't, they're hostile, everywhere else has not been that way- even bad management is usually just incompetent, not hostile.)
- serge2k 12y ago
  > He [Bezos] attended Princeton University, intending to study physics, but soon returned to his love of computers and graduated summa cum laude, with a Bachelor of Science in Engineering in electrical engineering and computer science http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeff_Bezos#Early_and_personal_life http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeff_Bezos#Early_and_personal_l... I guess that's not engineering though.
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
MCRed 12y ago
One of the Amazing things about Amazon, compared to, say Microsoft, and which has since become a huge red flag for me is the culture is very cult like. Amazon management is very adept and focosed on blowing smoke up the skirt of employees. "Today is day one!" Even the use of "door desks"-- that cost the company more money than actual desks would-- is done to perpetuate the "we're just a startup, rah rah rah" BS "Culture". Its' gross manipulation but it also results in people who buy into it being REALLY dedicated to their beliefs-- because deep down people want to believe and Amazon gives them that (even though it then turns around and abuses them.) They do this for a reason-- by having these mantras and these beliefs about the company, it makes people not believe the negatives or think the negatives don't represent the whole company.

empressplay 12y ago

This isn't really 'new' -- this has been in the pipe for a while, and they've vetted a lot of service providers so I expect that with that amount of investment in it Amazon Services is going to be around for a while. If it eats your lunch, my condolences.

flyinglizard 12y ago

Amazon drone delivery WILL happen. This will be completely disruptive to how stuff is consumed. Amazon being able to reach any point in an urban environment from its outskirts, at any time of day, within minutes and at a cost of just cents, will completely change consumption patterns (at least for existing Amazon users). Once something has such a strong financial implication, any other obstacle in its way is going to crumble (not to mention that the technology is mature enough today to perform this; the barrier is regulation, and that can change with enough money at stake).

rplnt 12y ago
I can't tell if this is sarcasm or not.
- piyushpr134 12y ago
  You have been droned
- flyinglizard 12y ago
  Dead serious. The technology is there, the economics are there - it just seems outlandish as an idea, but for no real good reason.
  - randomsearch 12y ago
    > it just seems outlandish as an idea, but for no real good reason I imagine safety and power issues, talking to friends who research drone tech.
    - wstrange 12y ago
      And payload. A drone just can't carry any significant weight.
      - deleted 12y ago
        [deleted]

einrealist 12y ago

Isn't that equal to startup or seed investor culture? To me it is the only way to discover new markets or market strategies. It is the best thing Amazon can do and they have the money for these adventures. As a developer, this must be a dream environment to work in, even when only 1 idea in 10 works out.

serge2k 12y ago
Nope, not if you aren't coming up with the ideas.
- shubb 12y ago
  My perception, based on hearsay, is that Amazon is a high turn over, burn out kinda place. Even recruiters say that. Doesn't mean it's true but the perception is out there.

nknighthb 12y ago

> Remember the "drone delivery"? (It makes no sense on the face of it, and will never happen. But it was a big press release.) You mean the drone delivery they're actively testing in the UK? The drone delivery they're fighting with the FAA about? The drone delivery they just testified before Congress about? They're spending an awful lot of time, money, and political capital on something that makes no sense, will never happen, and was just a press release.

michaelt 12y ago
When I hear "drone delivery" I hear some PR guys spending $500 on a hobby drone, carrying a trivial weight a short distance within line-of-sight of a manual operator, then we don't hear any more about it. Textbook drone delivery: http://pandodaily.com/2013/10/14/zookal-starts-world-first-delivery-by-drone-service-in-sydney/ http://pandodaily.com/2013/10/14/zookal-starts-world-first-d... Cake drone delivery: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/china/10206212/Pie-in-the-sky-Chinese-authorities-shoot-down-worlds-first-cake-drones.html http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/china/1020621... Pizza drone delivery: http://www.adweek.com/adfreak/dominos-tests-delivery-pizza-remote-controlled-drone-150259 http://www.adweek.com/adfreak/dominos-tests-delivery-pizza-r... Parcel delivery drones: http://news.cnet.com/8301-11386_3-57601531-76/drones-in-china-deliver-packages-even-a-birthday-cake/ http://news.cnet.com/8301-11386_3-57601531-76/drones-in-chin... http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/sep/25/german-dhl-launches-first-commercial-drone-delivery-service http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/sep/25/german-dhl... Beer delivery drones: http://www.billboard.com/biz/articles/news/branding/1561256/are-beer-drones-the-future-of-music-festivals-a-qa-with-darkwing http://www.billboard.com/biz/articles/news/branding/1561256/... Taco delivery drones: http://tacocopter.com/ http://tacocopter.com/ Burrito delivery drones: http://www.forbes.com/sites/tomiogeron/2012/12/17/burrito-bomber-drone-parachutes-carnitas-to-your-doorstep/ http://www.forbes.com/sites/tomiogeron/2012/12/17/burrito-bo... Sushi delivery drones: http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=y9RKXO1rr7g http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=y9RKX... Rubber shoe delivery drones: https://www.techinasia.com/crocs-japan-drone-delivery-crash/ https://www.techinasia.com/crocs-japan-drone-delivery-crash/ General delivery drones: http://matternet.us/our-vision/ http://matternet.us/our-vision/ http://www.economist.com/news/technology-quarterly/21567193-networking-enthusiasts-dream-building-drone-powered-internet-carry-objects http://www.economist.com/news/technology-quarterly/21567193-... http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/news/11210026/Drone-on-your-doorstep-UK-start-up-trials-delivery-service.html http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/news/11210026/Drone-on... http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/09/02/project_wing_google_delivery_drones/ http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/09/02/project_wing_google_... I think a certain amount of scepticism is warranted :)

the_mitsuhiko 12y ago

> Even AWS was a fake product-- they claimed it was "the infrastructure that ran Amazon.com", which was a straight up lie. (I worked for the company at the time.) All they had was S3. This product stuck to the wall and grew and became a real product over time, and so they backfilled. Citation for this lie please. Because parts of your statement here do not really make sense. For instance that S3 was at one point they only service they had.

pja 12y ago
I think you misunderstood: the OP is saying that S3 was the only service that Amazon was actually using internally at the time out of the initial AWS service offering, even though AWS as a whole was sold as "the infrastructure that runs Amazon". I thought AWS started with EC2 & S3? Anyone got a link to a reliable history? (Fwiw, I’ve heard the same thing the OP says elsewhere.)
- the_mitsuhiko 12y ago
  > I think you misunderstood: the OP is saying that S3 was the only service that Amazon was actually using internally at the time out of the initial AWS service offering, even though AWS as a whole was sold as "the infrastructure that runs Amazon". I can't even find sources of such a claim at the time the first offering of AWS occurred. The claim has made that as of 2010, 100% of amazon.com traffic goes via EC2 which I believe is likely as it has been mentioned by Amazon engineers. That AWS was not built for amazon first and foremost has been said from the start. Jeff Bezos himself said early on that why only build it for themselves when they can sell it. > I thought AWS started with EC2 & S3? Anyone got a link to a reliable history? AWS's first service was SQS which launched two years before S3. EC2 launched half a year after S3. There is a bit of history here: http://jeff-barr.com/2014/08/19/my-first-12-years-at-amazon-dot-com/ http://jeff-barr.com/2014/08/19/my-first-12-years-at-amazon-...
  - justinsb 12y ago
    Do you not remember yourself how AWS was initially pitched?

dingaling 12y ago

> We had 4 reorgs a year and a lot of chaos because they were constantly spinning up random teams for BS initiatives -- many of whome were nothing more than a press release. To me, who served 15 years of corporate coding dronery for a Fortune 100 company, that sounds totally awesome. In all that time I served on three teams.

B-Con 12y ago

You make it sound like every non-existent product was a failure, at that many were press-release driven. But companies do try weird things just to see what sticks sometimes. > (remember google glass? Yeah, it really is gone, it made no sense to begin with, but they won't admit it) This is an example. Glass was clearly an experimental product to gather information. It was advertised, priced, and distributed like one. If you think it was a failure or is dead, you paid little to no attention to the life cycle. Throw something at the wall, see what happens, refine, try again. Refining the experiment or using the information to go pursue something else isn't failure. I would assume that Amazon has a similar philosophy, at least to some extent.

AndrewKemendo 12y ago

Same could be said about Google, except Google gets a dedicated userbase and then shuts the service down.

galfarragem 12y ago

"I have not failed. I've just found 10,000 ways that won't work." - Thomas A. Edison

jayvanguard 12y ago

Drones are still going: http://techcrunch.com/2015/03/30/canada-proves-fertile-ground-for-amazon-drone-delivery-tests/ http://techcrunch.com/2015/03/30/canada-proves-fertile-groun... Don't forget they started in books and now sell pretty much everything. Also, the kindle seemed to work out pretty well.

gibsonje 12y ago

Doesn't google do this same thing?...

mandeepj 12y ago

You forgot to mention Amazon fire phone but that was a real product developed over 4+ years

newobj 12y ago

I read the whole comment and wasn't sure what the point was, other than to display your still lingering AMZNPTSD? "Amazon makes dozens of "products" every year, to do press releases, to sell more Amazon stock/keep the stock price high." That's quite a leap of logic. Really thought it would have been that $90B of annual revenue that was keeping the stock high.

cek 12y ago

http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/mar/30/amazon-tests-drones-secret-site-canada-us-faa http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/mar/30/amazon-tes...

thaumaturgy 12y ago

The drone delivery at least seems to still be a major ongoing effort on Amazon's part: http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/mar/30/amazon-tests-drones-secret-site-canada-us-faa http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/mar/30/amazon-tes... Amazon's been making a lot of press lately leaning hard on the FAA to shorten up their paperwork lifecycle for outdoor testing in the US, as well as eliminating the regulatory requirement for line-of-sight flight. If drone delivery is a dead project, Amazon doesn't know it yet.

giarc 12y ago

Look up GOOG-411 which was a service they used to collect speech and language data in addition to providing services to the public. I'm sure people had a similar opinion to yours about GOOG-411, but it was incredibly valuable them. Sometimes companies disguise data collection as a service.