[nojvek]

The thing that baffles me is the industry perception is that Amazon has subpar engineering but Amazon right now is 2nd after Apple for Marketcap, so they must be doing something right.

I love the Amazon customer service. They’ve managed to crack a difficult problem and execute enough that other Giants haven’t come close to it yet.

GCP and Azure tail AWS by quite a bit. Amazon online retail is a Google search engine level monopoly now.

So Amazon can do a lot of things wrong, but I’d have to say they get the important parts right.

[Godel_unicode]

> Amazon online retail is a Google search engine level monopoly now.

Not even particularly close. Amazon doesn't even have a majority of online sales, although it's getting close. They seem like a much bigger force than they are because of growth.

https://techcrunch.com/2018/07/13/amazons-share-of-the-us-e-...

[pas]

They are big, because they invested every penny they made into getting big. And those pennies are converted through human misery in "fulfillment centers". (And AWS on-call is not that fancy either for engineers, though the two are almost incomparable.)

They got some parts right, some parts awfully wrong, and some are just irrelevant now. They make money, they are cheap + convenient, and that usually what people focus on. They are not sophisticated, they are not great designers, etc.