A-Cloud PR/FAQ | Hacker News Reader

A-Cloud PR/FAQ

tbray.org

44 pointsMindGods8 comments

Why single out Amazon? Why not ask the same thing of Google and Microsoft as well?

Tim worked for Amazon up until last month, so it's front of mind for him. The gag is that this is a proposal in a hyperspecific internal format being written in the public domain by someone who is now an outsider.

PR/FAQ might be the only thing I’d love to borrow from Amazon process wise

If I had quit for the reasons that he quit Amazon, I wouldn't have the stomach to continue worrying about it.

I dont like this. He wrote it like its already been decided:

> Today, at AWS re:Invent, Jeff Bezos and Andy Jassy jointly announced A-Cloud, a new Delaware corporation which will assume ownership of Amazon Web Services' assets and become the employer of existing AWS employees.

Granted, this is on the same page:

> SEATTLE--(Business Wire)--December 1, 2020

but it just reads to me like some fanfiction, rather than a serious proposal.

PR FAQs start with a future-looking press release which, if you want to call it that, is effectively fan fiction. They are certainly more than a little campy at times, but they're a way to set a vision for what you want the world see when the product is debuted. There's one of these for arguably every single AWS service ever.

The external and internal FAQ components are also there, and most of the normal qs (What will they most like/dislike) are present in this one. Though I will say that some of his answers wouldn't pass muster, like for "What will customers most dislike about the launch of A-Cloud?". FAQ answers aren't meant to be puffery, and a better one might comment on how this would introduce some temporary overhead that wouldn't be providing value to the customers who didn't care about the Amazon/AWS relationship.

That is the format of Amazon PR/FAQs. They are written "from the future" usually including a made-up release date.

This is the format, but the content is unrecognizable as an Amazon PR/FAQ. The PR doesn't tell the story of what customer pain is being addressed, and what customers say about the newly released feature aside from "Customers won't be able to tell the difference" and, later "We're confident that A-Cloud will continue to support [us]."

I'm a leaf-node engineer, and I'd send this PR/FAQ back for significant rework.

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