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Comment by kotaKat | Hacker News Reader

Sidebar: I love how Amazon basically gave up on AWS Chime for Slack. Even dogfooding their own messaging product didn't work.

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IDK how the Chime team managed to make such a garbage product. Like, somehow they managed to make something even worse than Teams with a UI that made Webex look modern. I know there are good product people inside Amazon, so IDK what combination of incentives resulted in Chime.

Genuinely, it was one of the worst parts of working at Amazon. Especially since I often interacted with people who only used Chime. Messages would be missed for weeks because they'd never check slack, or I'd never check chime. Awful experience.

Dang, that's a pretty classic dynamic. It even happens between just using a single chat app and email

Amazon's toxic culture finally caught up to them. Early on they nailed it with Retail and AWS. Since then, all that terrible cutthroat culture grinded the efficacy down into producing just abomination after abomination of any business besides, just throwing bodies at AWS.

I'm trying to think of a single Amazon-made product I've used that has a good UI/UX. I guess their main shopping website gets the job done (I would argue their messy product categorization would harm my UX rating of them) but their iOS app is one of the ugliest thing I have installed on my phone.

Imo a lot of AWS products are garbage. Their key competency is making technical products for technical users from scratch given concrete requirements

All the "we built it so we could say we have it in sales meetings" stuff is pretty bad

Amazon acquired it. Initially, it was a messenger app (not) used in India.

Whatever the reasons, all Amazon UIs are always pretty awful

> I know there are good product people inside Amazon

For UI though? I mainly use the shopping site, AWS, and Prime Video, but none of those are productivity-style apps, which need to have less basic workflows to be competitive. Can you name any successful Amazon apps along those lines?

This is true. Amazon Seller Central, AWS Partner Central, and Glue Databrew are all Amazon productivity-style apps, and I hated every minute of using them. Quicksight is okay these days, but it took them a decade to get there. They really struggle outside of devtools and consumer-facing web experiences.

Unless something has changed recently, Slack uses AWS Chime SDK for audio/video, so at least the core technology is great.

The Chime team is still busy. They released a new version just two weeks ago!

When AWS had meetings with us we’d insist on setting up the call ourselves to avoid using the steaming pile of garbage that was Chime. AWS folks confided that they didn’t mind and weren’t thrilled about being forced to use dogfooded stuff that literally seemingly no customers wanted to buy.

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