News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

A comment on Why is Amazon all of a sudden not re-investing all its profits?. Parent comment

Re:Why is Amazon all of a sudden not re-investing all its pr... by rgbrgb on Friday April 29, 2016 @04:45PM (#11598635)
IDK, employee count seems like a red herring. To me it's much more impressive to do a lot with a small number of employees (like WhatsApp's 18M users/engineer [0]). Amazon incredibly impressive, I just mark the high employee count as a point against them rather than in their favor.

[0]: http://www.wired.com/2015/09/whatsapp-serves-900-million-use...

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Why is Amazon all of a sudden not re-investing all its pr... by benologist on Friday April 29, 2016 @05:06PM (#11598770)
There's some notes about how Whatsapp achieved that here [1], they attribute their capacity in part to Erlang's concurrency and in part to cloud hosting with SoftLayer. Amazon is the origin of SoftLayer's cloud services and single biggest reason one engineer can manage arbitrary numbers of servers/users:

    The popularization of the term can be traced to 2006 when 
    Amazon.com introduced its Elastic Compute Cloud. [2]
[1] http://research.dyn.com/2014/03/global-consumerwhatsapp/

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloud_computing#History_of_clo...

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Why is Amazon all of a sudden not re-investing all its pr... by serge2k on Friday April 29, 2016 @05:37PM (#11598938)
Except most of those are fulfillment center employees anyway. Plus they are working on the robots.
[ Parent | on HN ]