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by L_Rahman 3320 days ago
Product development incentive structures.

Imagine you lead the product team at AWS.

- The team is reviewing what to build for the next quarter.

- You have a long list of revenue-generating features

- At the end of the list there's one more item that'll help your customers spend LESS money on your product.

- You can only build so many things and you know that you, your department, and Amazon the company will get pats on the back in $$$ form if you focus on the revenue generating features

- Sure, it'd be really good to help longterm customers understand their costs better, but your biggest ones have the resources to build that infrastructure themselves anyways.

And that is why this is so hard.

1 comments

I think you're absolutely right, but what's hilarious to me is that they have private pricing for many of their services. For the traffic we're already doing, we just asked and they knocked our cloudfront bill down nearly 75%. We didn't have to change our usage at all. Granted, we serve a lot of traffic.
What order of magnitude of traffic are we talking?
A couple of PB per week, I'd guess