[mavhc]

> This is why I'm convinced places that use proprietary tech are going to fail in the future since the natural forces of competition will cause the internal technology to stagnate

This was Bezos' reasoning for making as much of their internal software available to the public via AWS, a) now it's required to be documented, b) it's now subject to competition, you know it's not the best if no one's using it.

[scarface74]

This meme needs to die. AWS was always built from the ground up to be a new product not an offshoot from Amazon retail.

https://www.networkworld.com/article/2891297/the-myth-about-...

[dtech]

Jeff issued a famous memo early on that mandaded public interfaces even for internal usage [1].

GP was talking how this improves reward structure, not about AWS

[1] https://medium.com/slingr/what-year-did-bezos-issue-the-api-...

[scarface74]

Which has nothing to do with

This was Bezos' reasoning for making as much of their internal software available to the public via AWS

Those APIs had nothing to do with AWS. So how was the original poster not talking about AWS when they mentioned AWS?

Also a clean public interface says nothing about how badly written and documented the underlying code is.

[mavhc]

I'm using AWS to mean the 212 different cloudy services they offer, not the original compute and storage products

[scarface74]

No Amazon retail doesn’t develop a service internally and turn it over to AWS so they can sell it to customers. AWS treats Amazon Retail as just another customer that sometimes gets access to services before they are made publicly available. They talk about this all of the time at reinvent.

[mavhc]

I mean Amazon as a whole, not specifically the retail arm. Wasn't the point that every internal service should be able to be productised? This was much later than when AWS was started.