Yeah, Amazon is a super easy problem. Let's try to make a website that sells everything. We'll only need to get every manufacturer under the sun to sell under us and make a system is compatible with all other theirs. Heck, we can easily make a big ol' warehouse system that stores every single freaking product known to man-kind and make it profitable. Super easy.

Oh, and getting your customers to become more loyal to you? Easy peazy. Combine those little warehouses with two day shipping literally anywhere in the United States and offer it to customers for under a hundred bucks a year. Trivial optimization problem, if you ask me.

And Amazon Web Services? Pbbbt. Just get some servers and make software that separates them into virtualized storage, computing, DNS, long-term storage, etc into different sizes and make the uptime not suck. That's like CS101

Don't even get me started on the Kindle. Just switch your entire focus from eCommerce and other industries to hardware and make a tablet and integrate it with your other media services (music, video, books, etc) and offer it for cheaper than anyone else. Super easy.

#shitthatHNsays

Google -- solved a single very important problem really well by applying a well known tool (SVD and graph networks) to a novel example, also made android, otherwise not very exciting.

Furthermore, brick and mortar problems are hard -- things break, rot, get lost, require staff to move them around, etc. Not to poo-poo Google or any other pure software company, but it isn't harder because its on a computer, it's actually easier.

I'm not sure it's that easy.

Logistics is an easy problem? AWS is an easy problem? Overturning the publishing industry is an easy problem?

Put another way: Google has one product (search) that makes them money. Amazon has several.

    Solves easy problems at large scale

I would love to see you in an Amazon interview. 80% of the interviewed melt down in the middle of it because they can't solve a problem that is 10 orders of magnitude easier than the problems they would be tackling on the job.

You kidding right? I hardly think Amazon Prime 2 day shipping an easy problem at scale. Fortune 500 companies outsource this kind of problem to companies like IBM, and they deal with it on smaller scales.

This is not an easy problem to solve while being profitable. And they are working on introducing perishables into the problem statement. Hardly easy.

Google literally has one product that keeps nearly all of their lights on.

They're far more vulnerable than most people think.

Steel producers - Simple manufacturing at large scale

Car producers - Complex manufacturing at large scale

I wouldn't say one is necessarily better than the other.