Hacker News Reader

Comment by johnbender | Hacker News Reader

> It is a story that called for strategic depth, not technical wizardry, design brilliance or sheer energy.

While I can't argue that Amazon has displayed "design brilliance or sheer energy" I do consider the creation of AWS and running the Amazon store front at its current scale to be acts of "technical wizardry". It's really unfortunate to downplay the contribution of the brilliant engineers who made Amazon possible.

View on HN

Forbes by and large markets to business types, an audience that's going to be looking for the business side of a win.

Shiny suits don't typically want to hear about engineering heroics because anything that involves success without a bunch of MBA's behind it subtly implies that they're irrelevant.

I really like this comment. The MBA-ization of corporations is not a thing to be praised. The reason why companies fail is because management is disconnected from the realities of their business and manage it from a spreadsheet point of view. See "Execution: The discipline of getting things done" for a lucid explanation of what execution is, why it matters and why companies succeed and fail. Hint: Companies who have CEOs that know little of how the company actually works are not to be emulated.

Not only was it technical wizardry, but it was a huge gamble.

According to the article, Take AWS for instance. The business had no right to succeed. It violated all sorts of textbook rules about brand elasticity, market positioning, core competency management and so forth.

He lambasts Google for the same risk taking with Google+

His point was that it is a gamble as part of a greater strategy

Reply on news.ycombinator.com