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Comment by adventured | Hacker News Reader

I'm astounded these days when I pull up an overview list of all of the AWS products. They currently list 142 products (several should be excluded). It seems like that has tripled in maybe four years. One of the nice things about AWS trying to do everything, it's guaranteed they're going to do a lot of things at a mediocre level. As they aggressively expand that product list, the number of things they suck at will increase.

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it's guaranteed they're going to do a lot of things at a mediocre level

Why?

If it was a smaller company then spreading resources out across more and more products could result in a drop in quality, but this is Amazon. They have practically unlimited resources. They can afford to put far more in to products than other companies, and they've already got a team who can build some really good stuff. If they can capture what works and use it to understand how to build their products that should result in better products rather than worse.

By that logic, all big companies must be the best because they have huge resources.

Scale means you can throw lots of people at something, it doesn't mean you can make it good.

Bureaucracy, internal politics, budget/cost cutting, unpleasant work environment, short-term stock price targets instead of long-term goal based targets... There are a million and one reasons why big companies start to suck.

I agree, so many of the AWS products feel almost abandoned. Like they did the easy 80% of the work, released, and then coasted.

I don't see why that's necessarily the case. One could argue as they grow their software development methodologies also advance as an organization and they'll create better products. Also as more competition can spur either copying or innovation.

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