
Amazon Building a Tech Business for the Long Haul - otoolep
http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/10/09/amazon-building-a-tech-business-for-the-long-haul
======
crabasa

        Certainly, a good part of A.W.S. software is open source,
        which means it could be used elsewhere, and companies
        like Microsoft and Google also have big clouds. But 
        neither of them, nor IBM, which also wants the cloud 
        business, created more than 500 new features and services
        last year, as A.W.S. did.
    

Not sure about the precision of that number, but the speed and agility of AWS
compared to MSFT/GOOG/IBM is astonishing. I still don't quite understand how
they do it.

~~~
quanticle
>I still don't quite understand how they do it.

Why maintain and improve your existing services when you can get credit for
launching a new shiny thing? Steve Yegge called out this tendency in his
(in)famous platforms rant [1]:

    
    
        They prioritize launching early over everything else, including retention 
        and engineering discipline and a bunch of other stuff that turns out to 
        matter in the long run. So even though it's given them some competitive 
        advantages in the marketplace, it's created enough other problems to make it 
        something less than a slam-dunk.
    

Amazon's "speed and agility" comes at the cost of not updating anything, ever.
If you want new functionality, you'll have to integrate a new service.

[1]:
[https://plus.google.com/+RipRowan/posts/eVeouesvaVX](https://plus.google.com/+RipRowan/posts/eVeouesvaVX)

~~~
joevandyk
There's benefits to immutable/stable services.

------
newacctperpost
This discussion of Amazon's agility meshes well with Steve Yegge's famous rant
on Google and Amazon. He attributes Amazon's success to their focus on
designing all their software as a service, and actually credits this strategy
as the very reason that AWS came to be in the first place.

[https://plus.google.com/+RipRowan/posts/eVeouesvaVX](https://plus.google.com/+RipRowan/posts/eVeouesvaVX)

~~~
gashad
Such a good read. Fun fact: it was first published 4 years ago to the day.

~~~
HillaryBriss
Yes. Great stuff. Just reading it ...

Yegge sez: "a platform-less product will always be replaced by an equivalent
platform-ized product."

I guess that's true. If I had to defend that statement, I'd try to argue that
a platform, especially an open platform, will be tested, poked, prodded,
evaluated, evolved and maybe even documented by many more developers than some
monolithic piece of software in some closed code base.

But what other arguments are there?

------
petra
What's this talk about "no vendor lock-in"? i though that(lock-in) was the
idea behind AWS's many services.

~~~
airza
not really, everything i've used so far is pretty interoperable with whatever.
The exception I guess would be their metaservices that do logging and auditing
of AWS services, but the SDK is pretty developed to let you shove, say, S3
into whatever you want.

I'm open to be corrected on this but I don't think it's good to confuse "our
different offerings have lots of interoperable synergy" with "it's fucking
impossible to migrate off this"

~~~
adamc
Personally, I don't think lock-in means "it's fucking impossible to migrate
off this". It just means it will be sufficiently painful that it is a strong
deterrent. A service can be great and still come with a lot of lock-in; it's
just another trade-off to consider.

~~~
airza
Okay, what do you think is painful about migrating off of AWS that is unique
to their design? Or painful about it at all?

~~~
adamc
I don't have the right experience to answer that.

------
tuna-piano
I think AWS and similiar cloud providers have a tough challenge for the long
term.

The big question is how cheap will computing get, and how will the demand of
that computing increase over time? If prices continue to decrease rapidly, it
becomes very difficult to maintain large revenue growth, even with unit-volume
increases.

In 20 years, how cheap will core services like S3 and ec2 be, and how will
AWS' revenue on those services compare to today?

They are also developing a lot of AWS software that probably won't decrease in
price over time. For example, over the past 30 years database hardware has
decreased dramatically in price, but Oracle software licenses have not. AWS
has a lot of services that are some combination of complex software and
hardware components.

~~~
dogma1138
Hardware hasn't really decreased that much not if you count what services you
want to run these days on it compared to 10-20-30 years ago.

If you just run a simple web-application sure it's much much cheaper today
than it was in 2000, but as technology evolved that isn't enough for big
business today, if you look at companies that still build their own servers
then unless they have unlimited space the servers these days tend to be much
more expensive and exotic hardware is more and more common (it's not that
uncommon to see SQL/BI servers with quite expensive compute/GPU's these days,
5 years ago it was all those "IOPS accelerators" or "specialized" SSD's, in 5
years it will be something else).

As far as looking at the price of S3 or EC2 in 20 years that's completely
irrelevant because those services for the most part will be irrelevant in 20
years, yes their might have their own counterparts but it's not like you will
still use the same services, just look at how drastically the way you build
and deploy applications has changed in 10 years.

------
davis
It was pretty strange seeing AWS written as A.W.S. It took me a second to
realize what they were talking about.

~~~
dlgeek
The New York Times style guide requires periods between all initial-isms. They
also write "F.B.I." and "C.I.A.". Drives me nuts.

------
sigmar
I started using uBlock's default-deny setting 2 weeks ago (it rejects all
requests to secondary domains unless the domain is explicitly allowed). It's
amazing to see how many websites use AWS or amazon ads these days.

It is really strange to think about how the average consumer views Amazon as
an online retailer, but that is really only half the picture. As the end of
the article states:

>Maybe someday A.W.S. will be the company that also happens to own an online
retailer.

~~~
empath75
I actually don't see how AWS and Amazon remain together in the long term. They
seem like two totally different businesses with different goals, long term
prospects, etc.

~~~
burnte
Because the concept that a company has to have everything align with a "core
business" is a relatively new, and incredibly stupid concept. The business of
business is making money, not being in a specific industry. Nokia has made
paper, rubber products, wires, capacitors, robots, computers, phones and
networking equipment. Samsung has an even more broad array of products, as do
most Korean, Japanese, and Chinese conglomerates. The idea of a "core
business" is a relatively recent invention of western business which
mistakenly argued that a company could only do one thing well as though a
company and a person were the same thing. Dow, GE, P&G, Johnson Family
Enterprises, and Berkshire Hathaway would all disagree.

Jeff Bezos sees Amazon as the GE for the next 100 years. He has a long view
that left American corporate culture in the late 1970s. Japanese corporate
culture takes the long view, they have business plans that look out across
decades, rather than quarters. Bezos is making amazon a very wide company,
because it's harder to fail as a wide company than it is a deep company. Now,
in some ways Amazon IS a deep company, with Amazon products delivered through
their supply chain, marketed by their website running on their platform, and a
rich media ecosystem on Amazon consumer devices. However it will survive
damage to one of those sectors because of the breadth of the company.

The idea of cor businesses and splitting up companies that do "to much" is
rooted in the quarterly corporate culture, which sacrifices the future of the
company in exchange fore shareholder (and executive) rewards today. Business
stagnant? Split it up into aligned companies for a quick stock boost. Did you
actually create anything new or useful, or change the way the businesses
operate? No, but it looks good on paper.

~~~
eldavido
Agree that American business culture is too short-sighted.

The question is size is far from decided, though. Though these Japanese firms
may _survive_ long-term, they often aren't good stewards of shareholder
capital as measured by return on equity (ROE) and other financial metrics. But
it does seem that conglomerates are making a comeback, with Alphabet, Amazon,
and the perennial favorite Berkshire, whose own CEO has said their size is
starting to present problems. Definitely an interesting question.

~~~
burnte
I completely agree that the Japanese might not be the best model, but as
usual, I feel the truth lies in a third path. Not quarterly, not 50 years, but
maybe look for a path for the company to survive the next 10-20 years, and
always be willing to change. "Plans are worthless, planning is priceless."

------
5ersi
We use AWS and this is what I can tell you:

1\. Its really expensive: about 5 times as expensive as dedicated servers.

2\. Not reliable: they will shoot down servers any time they like. You will
need to make sure you have redundancies in place and pay for them.

3\. Lock-in: their services (beyond EC2) come with a set of proprietary APIs
that your app will depend on. This creates a lock in.

4\. Still need DevOps: so you pay a lot, get locked-in and still need to put
everything together by yourself and make sure it runs reliably? Yep, you still
need devops/admins which at the end is probably the biggest cost of your
operation.

So, here are my suggestions:

You have a low-volume and don't mind a lock in: use a dedicated mobile/web
cloud ala Firebase/Parse/etc or go with a true PaaS solution like
AppEngine/Heroku.

If you have a big volume: you will need to bite the bullet, hire some devops
and setup+maintain your own dedicated servers. You will at the end pay much
less for servers compared to AWS, have full control over hem and have no lock-
in.

------
ChrisLTD
Amazon.com is more than 20 years old. It’s not surprising they are in markets
for the long haul.

~~~
thoughtpalette
Yea, the headline is poorly worded. Of course they're in tech for the long
haul... especially considering their latest quarterly earnings report.

------
rokhayakebe
Could Amazon be just a front/testing platform for AWS?

~~~
BIair
This should be higher.

~~~
varelse
No, it shouldn't. The relationship between Amazon and AWS is, um, complicated.

~~~
rokhayakebe
Would you care to elaborate? AWS is a Business Unit of Amazon, how is the
relationship complicated business wise?

