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Comment by serge2k | Hacker News Reader

> But for a complex system, I prefer what Google will produce

Having worked there in teams near to their tablets I really think Amazon would have a hard time producing software of the complexity of Android or Chrome.

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I have a question. Do you think this Amazon culture is the cause or the result of service-oriented architecture at Amazon? Or maybe am I completely off the mark here.

I found this quote from SEC filings. Jeff Bezos says:

> Service-oriented architecture -- or SOA -- is the fundamental building abstraction for Amazon technologies.

This was in 2010. https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1018724/000119312511...

It sounds like they have been committed to it at least since 2005? https://s3.amazonaws.com/aws001/trailhead/MigratingAmazonCom... I'd imagine internally it'd have to be a lot sooner than that because I think they were ready to release AWS by 2006.

Sorry, I don't mean to start a holy war. I just wonder if there's any connection... What do you think?

If we use Steve Yegge's famous rant for reference, it goes back to 2002.

https://plus.google.com/+RipRowan/posts/eVeouesvaVX

Great read, thanks.

you mean like the Amazon retail site?

I'm not so sure, if Amazon develops it's own logistics solutions I would say that those are a bit more complicated than Chrome.

To be fair, Amazon has developed a Silk browser for their Kindle Fire tablets.

Silk is a fork of Chromium, Amazon just piggy-backed on Google's hard work. Just like Fire OS itself (a fork of Android).

You mean the way Google piggy-packed on Apples work which in turn piggy-backed on KDEs work? Amazon did an extension to optimise rendering on small devices, which is complexity wise not too far off to what Apple & Google contributed to the rendering engines, which at the end is the tricky bit an a browser, not the Chrome.

No. Google contributed massive amounts to the webkit code and built a full browser around it (including a state of the art javascript engine).

Silk is a different story.

Really don't understand the downvotes. Whether they gave back to the community or not is another story, but they did piggy-back on previous code, even though adding a lot themselves and giving back a lot, but it still built on massive existing work.

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