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I wish I'd said it like that. Surprising, for just that reason.

Your Google point (besides being a contrast to amazon's surprising athena) is an interesting way of describing things.

Youtube, Android and even adwords & web analytics were bought fairly formed, and clearly were quite good already. That's a skill in itself. When you think of examples of ebay, skype and how few buy-outs really do succeed like that.

Google could make the web work too. Remember how slow yahoo a basic webmail service was. The idea that they'd make an excel that worked.. it wasn't trivial.

But I think you're right on the lead skill. If it works best with an exabyte of data, a billion CPU-years... it works best on a google.

I think that is an interesting insight - the majority of Google's offerings are from aquisitions of 'established' implementations, whereas Amazon's are developed in-house to solve a pain-point, that is felt by other businesses, too.

So, is Amazon really more B2B, while Google is B2C?

Is Amazon using e-commerce like a US university looks at undergrads for funding?

Google has a good mixture of acquired and organic. You really want to successfully be able to do both but most really only can do one or the other.

Google has bought a number of companies, yes (Google Maps is another piece that started as an acquisition) but I'd note that which acquisitions survive and thrive also relates back to the core competencies.

AWS was surprising.

Stage 1: Railroads are going to be the next big thing. Smart play: Be one of the first with a railroad.

Stage 2: Everyone knows railroads are the next big thing. Tons of people are raising money to build railroads. Smart play: Sell those people the stuff to build railroads.

Rhetorical:

So now - what is Stage 3; once everyone has a railroad - then what?

The metaphor was broken.

Stage 2: make it easy for everyone to have a railroad by leasing them yours. Lease yours multiple times over, each time for less than it would cost the customer to build a new one.

Stage 3: everyone has a railroad which they rent from you. Collect rent on all railroad activity forever.

How about: Everyone owns a car?

Where cars are a small Virtual Server, and the VPS provider runs on AWS. Oh no, it was a railroad all along!

It always comes back to the car analogy

rent out the cars

And this is where Uber/Waymo are going.

Welcome, you just reinvented the problem of rent-seeking.

“Rent-seeking” has nothing to do with “renting someone a car”, common term notwithstanding.

Rent seeking has everything to do with trying to extract a continuous profit out of a resource.

Are you sure?

So now - what is Stage 3; once everyone has a railroad - then what?

Then it's a long time after the initial Industrial Revolution, and you're in a fantastic world where it's commonplace for ordinary people to own a steel machine which can travel as fast as a train at "high speed."

I don’t know where the metaphor is supposed to go, but I’d imagine that the next stage for AWS is to move further into SaaS products, and to introduce new products and features that lower the engineering overheads of operating on AWS.

Buy trains.

I think it was "the amount needed during normal periods" vs. "the amount needed during the one extremely busy month of the year".

They realised other people will have this problem (maybe at different times), and they already had the technology.

Granted its easy to speculate with hindsight.

So much this. A commerce company needs peak compute in December and tax companies in March, so why not share server farms? If you extend that idea to a business model, you make a normally internal cost center into an external facing revenue generator.

I recall an episode of Software Engineering Daily where the host, Jeff was interviewing some Microsoft guys and they suggested AWS was the result of Amazon selling it’s own infrastructure. Jeff interrupted him and said that was “not accurate.” Sorry I don’t have link to the episode here but it was not a very good one. The Microsoft guy responded by saying the truth of the story didn’t matter, which is pretty absurd but I think reflects how Amazon came to dominate the public consciousness. The truth just doesn’t matter in advertising or in reputation. We’ve learned how to undermine it with buzz and mediation.

For example, many were sick of Wal-Mart. Was it because of the way they treated their workers? No. If it were, they wouldn’t have ran to Target and Amazon instead. The actual shopping behaviors are guided by convenience but judtified by cultural associations. Target capitalized on the same image appeal without offering anything new at all. Amazon is, culturally, Target + Silicon Valley. Ad agencies all understand this very well. Amazon is neoliberalism in the flesh. There’s nothing a bit surprising about it.

What I assume is being referred to is the story that AWS got started to sell Amazon's spare compute capacity. Werner Vogels has publicly stated that this is a myth: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8658383

I've always wondered about how Target can maintain this image as some kind of forward-thinking retailer when they're no better than Walmart is on most of that stuff, but I think the answer is honestly mostly "the Wrong Kind of People shop at Walmart."

They offer better service and selection in many areas than Walmart. This is particularly true outside of the south, where Walmart is just better for some reason. Here in the northeast, Walmart is like DMV especially when benefit checks come in.

They also appeal more to women, and eschew product categories that men and poor folk flock to like car parts, guns, fishing, Jesus books, crafting, etc.

> They also appeal more to women, and eschew product categories that men and poor folk flock to like car parts, guns, fishing, Jesus books, crafting, etc.

Target does not eschew most of those categories (guns and car parts are the only ones I think they consistently don't carry). Also, as an aside, crafting isn't a “men and poor people” category, anyway, but a famously huge interest for middle class women.

My local Walmart probably has two full aisles for crafting stuff... probably about 200 linear feet. The next aisle is ball jars and canning.

Target probably has about 40 feet of that stuff, mostly scrapbooking and similar stuff. No yarn, no knitting needles, etc.

Fishing in my local Target in a single 4-ft section, next to 12ft of water bottle and Thermos jars. Walmart is probably two half aisles of stuff.

While I don't doubt that there are some differences in focus, Walmart generally has more of everything than Target.

Women are also more religious and more likely to attend religious services.

I live in Massachusetts. My experience is that the selection is smaller and more expensive but the goods are not of a higher quality (especially if you have a Walmart Super Center). But I think the "especially when the benefit checks come in" aside illustrates exactly what I am talking about.

Walmart targets the market, it isn't a good or bad thing. Walmart is sort of an ersatz bank for under-banked folks and folks on the margins.

> eschew product categories that men and poor folk flock to like car parts, guns, fishing, Jesus books, crafting, etc.

Other than guns and car parts, I've seen all of the above at Target.

(However I'm in Houston, so product selection may vary regionally)

For me it's as simple as making it so the stores don't look like they've been through a looting riot recently. I still go to Walmart sometimes, but I'm generally not happy about it.

> Jeff interrupted him and said that was “not accurate.”

Not accurate to say that Amazon is selling its own infrastructure, or not accurate to say that they had the internal competencies to launch AWS due to building their own infrastructure? I've always assumed it's the latter -- AWS is an abstraction of tools they needed to build anyway -- rather than literally sharing compute etc. with Amazon services.

I think this was some lazy paraphrasing on my part. I’m pretty sure the latter is what they meant. Personally, to me, it sounds like ones of those business idea myths that may have some bit of truth but it’s mostly a viral spin.

Surprising or not, AWS makes a lot of sense when you look at Amazons core competency. Logistics.

Look at any individual AWS service by itself, none of them are all that groundbreaking or innovative. What is groundbreaking is that Amazon has managed to take all of these services, and distribute them through a massively complex and infinitely scaling ecosystem. That’s logistics.

This is very true. I remember around 2005-06 when they publicized black Friday as a proof by fire of their technology, pretty much daring the internet to bring their site down with huge deals all at the same time. And it was amazing that their website kept working. After that it seems like they realized they could sell the idea of automatically, infinitely scaling infrastructure, but it wasn't at all obvious from the outside.