Comment by pg_bot | Hacker News Reader

Comment by pg_bot | Hacker News Reader

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AWS is the leader in the cloud because of its 6-7 year head start on the competition, not because their product is better than their competitors. There was even a company built on top of AWS that made money by creating a reasonable UX on top of that product.[0]

walmart.com is better designed that amazon.com. I don't know when that happened but you can take a look at two product pages for the same book and be the judge. [1][2]

That's just the tip of the iceberg. I could rant about Amazon's software for days, but in the end software doesn't necessarily mean they are a bad company. If I order something from amazon I expect to get it quickly and in the case something goes wrong I can talk with someone who will be more than agreeable. That is why they are successful, not because of their software prowess.

[0]: https://www.heroku.com/

[1]: https://www.amazon.com/Thinking-Fast-Slow-Daniel-Kahneman/dp...

[2]: https://www.walmart.com/ip/Thinking-Fast-and-Slow/20530246

Heroku is PaaS while AWS started as IaaS and these are completely different. AWS has some PaaS offerings now and is leading the way in an even lighter abstraction with FaaS/serverless. Azure and GCP definitely have unique products but AWS still has plenty of leading tech and I think it's rather misleading to say they don't have anything better. In several instances they're the best simply because there isn't even any serious competition for that niche.

The design of a webpage for companies doing 100s of billions in revenue will be rather subjective and hard to change without materially affecting that revenue so I'm not sure how valid that comparison really is, or what it has to do with "better software".

I will say that building the infrastructure to power such an efficient ecommerce empire along with AWS is not trivial and you're likely vastly underestimating the quality of their systems based on what seem to be rather surface-level observations.

Heroku was targeting a much different audience from what AWS was targeting back in 2007 (yes everyone, its been over a decade!). AWS has gradually crawled up the stack over the past few years, but I'd still say Heroku is targeting customers for which the Heroku model is exactly what they want/need.

I'd also say that if AWS had a 6-7 year head start on the competition, then that was the competition being lazy. It's not as if Microsoft/Google didn't have the ability to deliver a cloud platform back in 2007, and history shows they were delivering cloud products around this time. Microsoft Azure was announced in 2008 and launched in 2010; Google App Engine launched in 2008, storage in 2010, and VMs in 2013.

Those product pages aren't really self evident as to which is better, I actually prefer Amazon's also, it seems to have more details about the item in addition of course to the 1000s of reviews.

While this isn't a direct problem with Amazon vs Walmart site design, I'm more likely to use Amazon due to the amount of reviews.

Walmart can do one thing right, while Amazon has the majority of it right for me. It's going to take a lot to sway me away from Amazon.

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