[btilly]

I would state the tradeoff very differently.

Amazon gives each team independence. Therefore it is virtually impossible to insist on consistency between what different teams do. Each team makes sense on its own, but the whole can be very, very confusing.

Google has a process that results in much greater internal consistency. It may not be a great UX, but it is consistent. Inside and out.

For small systems, Amazon is going to give a better UX. But for a complex system, I prefer what Google will produce.

[skynetv2]

as a long time Google user, I find it pretty ironic to use consistency and Google in the same sentence. If consistency exists internally at Google, none of it made in to their products unfortunately.

[spiderfarmer]

It's improving, but you still run into some of the interfaces that were designed 8 years ago.

But Microsoft is far worse in that department.

[serge2k]

> But for a complex system, I prefer what Google will produce

Having worked there in teams near to their tablets I really think Amazon would have a hard time producing software of the complexity of Android or Chrome.

[newjersey]

I have a question. Do you think this Amazon culture is the cause or the result of service-oriented architecture at Amazon? Or maybe am I completely off the mark here.

I found this quote from SEC filings. Jeff Bezos says:

> Service-oriented architecture -- or SOA -- is the fundamental building abstraction for Amazon technologies.

This was in 2010. https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1018724/000119312511...

It sounds like they have been committed to it at least since 2005? https://s3.amazonaws.com/aws001/trailhead/MigratingAmazonCom... I'd imagine internally it'd have to be a lot sooner than that because I think they were ready to release AWS by 2006.

Sorry, I don't mean to start a holy war. I just wonder if there's any connection... What do you think?

[kinkrtyavimoodh]

If we use Steve Yegge's famous rant for reference, it goes back to 2002.

https://plus.google.com/+RipRowan/posts/eVeouesvaVX

[deadbunny]

Great read, thanks.

[jknoepfler]

you mean like the Amazon retail site?

[tomascot]

I'm not so sure, if Amazon develops it's own logistics solutions I would say that those are a bit more complicated than Chrome.

[amaks]

To be fair, Amazon has developed a Silk browser for their Kindle Fire tablets.

[cle]

Silk is a fork of Chromium, Amazon just piggy-backed on Google's hard work. Just like Fire OS itself (a fork of Android).

[inflagranti]

You mean the way Google piggy-packed on Apples work which in turn piggy-backed on KDEs work? Amazon did an extension to optimise rendering on small devices, which is complexity wise not too far off to what Apple & Google contributed to the rendering engines, which at the end is the tricky bit an a browser, not the Chrome.

[serge2k]

No. Google contributed massive amounts to the webkit code and built a full browser around it (including a state of the art javascript engine).

Silk is a different story.

[inflagranti]

Really don't understand the downvotes. Whether they gave back to the community or not is another story, but they did piggy-back on previous code, even though adding a lot themselves and giving back a lot, but it still built on massive existing work.

[vacri]

Apparently Amazon also puts developers into the customer support rotation. If you want to improve customer experience, this is a great idea. I've worked small-medium business support before, and you're generally treated like chaff by the devs, who don't get to wear their own cut corners and bad decisions.