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by wpietri
3912 days ago
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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. |
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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.