I never saw a corroborating, or adding more detail source for Yegge's post, and I wonder if this wasn't Bezos himself talking. I think someone put him up to it.
This uncorroborated story is not 'conventional understanding'. It doesn't even demonstrate any link to AWS vision or architecture. Service oriented architectures existed years before this mythical memo and AWS didn't exist until years later. This memo reads like a Steve Jobs parody - just blatantly attributing all major tech and architectural decisions to Jeff's genius and foresight.
How do you know? Did you work at Amazon at the time? What's with this reflexively hostile posting style?
Tons of people also say Musk is a massive fraud who takes credit for others' work and is simply a cutthroat businessman like Edison without any technical expertise. Your posts sound the same. http://www.paulgraham.com/fh.html
Bezos and Musk are, in my opinion, clearly very good at both technology and business.
Did you read the linked story? How does demonstrate any tech vision or leadership for AWS by Bezos? Do you just blindly believe all of the claims (that don't even relate to AWS vision/tech leadership) made in the story? Do you honestly believe Bezos - the business leader and highest level manager of Amazon, who has an enormous amount on his plate, who has no technical background, is coming up with all of these high level architectural and tech decisions, instead of, say, the highly qualified and experienced engineers at Amazon? You seem to think billionaires are some kind of superheroes from fantasy land instead of actual human beings. You have to be a naive child to believe half of the claims about Bezos made in this story.
I did read it. I have no idea how much of it is true. But it seems fairly likely that enough of it is true to suggest that Bezos has a good mind for both technology and business.
The main claim made in there seems to be that Bezos wanted Amazon employees to switch to a more dogfooded API/service-oriented approach, with clear interfaces between different teams and areas of concern rather than internal private channels, to enable future renting out of hardware and services to customers, and that after he issued that edict people scrambled to implement it. Maybe Bezos originally came to that decision in part or wholly due to suggestions from others, but, either way, I've seen several people say he indeed did do something like that.
He used to program. He has a degree in "Electrical Engineering and Computer Science" from Princeton. Amazon had a ton of spare resources they could rent out. He's a pretty smart guy and is known for thinking about the long-term. It's not a massive stretch to say it's possible he could've made a decision like that back in 2002, when he had less on his plate than he does now.
The conventional understanding is that AWS was a top-down mandate by a prescient Bezos way ahead of its time, and that vision ultimately paid off.