> (From a brief reading of this thread, it seems like kqr, jacques_chester, and I are the only ones who have put this to practice in non-manufacturing contexts — though correct me if I'm wrong.)

And roenxi.

> So here's my pitch: every Wednesday morning, Amazon's leaders get together to go through 400-500 metrics within one hour.

Amazon's core value proposition is they maintain a large and very physical fleet of machines that they rent out. With serious standards for up-time that they can take real pride in.

They don't sell themselves as a software house. I'm sure they have tentacles everywhere and they aren't bad at it (if anything I'd expect them to be pretty good on a given project), but they've greatly benefited from using other people's software - they don't have their own DB for example, they reuse others and have a couple of PostgreSQL forks for more at-scale use cases.

I'm sure they get huge value from SPC (anything physical generally benefits from it), and I'm sure they use SPC for software out of reflex; but it doesn't follow that it is driving productive behaviour in the software branch of the business. A fleet of ~infinite servers benefits from controlling 400 metrics. Software development does not.