[saosebastiao]

I'd say Andrew Jassy is the person you are looking for. Jeff Bezos doesn't give a shit about the day to day strategy of AWS or any other existing Amazon business. He has implicitly said as much in his speeches at Amazon. He really only cares about the next billion dollar business to build within Amazon. Jassy leads AWS, which is the only technologically innovative part of Amazon. The retail side of Amazon is a technological black hole...a few standouts swimming amongst a sea of half-implemented non-solutions to problems that no longer exist but can't be changed because legacy.

[wpietri]

That definitely matches my understanding. As a long-time user of both Amazon and AWS (respectively 1997 and 2006), their product management strategies seem very different to me.

A lot of Amazon stuff smacks of high-level micromanagement. E.g., their thoroughly failed phone. Or the disappointing feature mish-mash that is the Kindle app. On the positive side, the original Kindle was groundbreaking because of similar micromanagement.

But the AWS stuff feels much more bottom up to me. They start with some small, discreet notion. They trial it in private, getting feedback and evolving in careful response to users. When it's solid enough, they open it up for everyone. And then they keep iterating, making things gradually better.

[saosebastiao]

I would agree with that. Small story: Working on the retail side of Amazon, one day I got pissed that if I wanted to use PostgreSQL that I had to set up my own EC2 server and EBS infrastructure and maintain it, whereas if I wanted a MySQL instance I could just use RDS. I had a few legitimate usecases at the time that required PostGIS, so I was annoyed about it and I vented on a few mailing lists about the lack of PostgreSQL in RDS.

In a move that I would have never seen in the retail side, a product manager at RDS emailed me and set up a meeting with me and a director and VP. He invited me to make my case for having PostgreSQL as an RDS option. For about an hour I explained why the existing options didn't fit my use case, how there was a burgeoning market that was waiting for it due to Oracle's mismanagement of MySQL, and how there were several teams within Amazon that preferred the strictness and standards compliance of PostgreSQL but chose MySQL due to not having to manage it. They thanked me, and less than a year later there was a public announcement of a PostgreSQL offering in RDS.

I don't think I can take full credit for them launching it...they already had public forum threads of people asking for it and tons of +1 responses. But they actually listened to me, and they took into account my expressed desires to have several extensions available as well. That sort of bottoms up communication doesn't happen on the other side of Amazon.

[wpietri]

Nice. Glad to hear that AWS builds products exactly how I think they should be built.