AWS is an offshoot of building the massive system needed to process the "we sell absolutely everything" goal. Methinks they just got so good at it, cloud services just kinda took on a life of its own and grew from there - but still feeds the retailing monster.

Echo is a consequence of exploring digital appliances as marketing tools. If you're going to build a device which can voice-interface someone ordering 6 bottles of Tide with extreme ease, doesn't take much more to turn it into a nice music speaker and tell you weather & sports & jokes on request. Echo, Fire, etc are just extensions to feeding the retailing monster.

Do notice how Amazon's innovative foray into cell phones crashed & burned hard - despite being lauded as rather a well-built device. That shows how straying too far doesn't work, and that "far" isn't very.

I worked at Amazon for a while and the point to note is that the Fire phone, despite being a public failure, led to a lot of things at Amazon. For ex: 1. The computer vision and machine learning stuff behind the 8 cameras on the Fire phone has been repacked and reused at multiple places. There's also a object recognition service in AWS if I remember correctly. 2. The FireOS, which powered the Fire phone, is being used on all Kindles except the older e-ink Kindles.

While the hardware division was indeed shut down, Amazon did manage to salvage as much as they can.

The cloud service didn't take a life on its own - in the very early days there was just EC2 and S3, nothing else. It took a lot of focused investment, commitment and trust from the management to give the AWS experiment more time so that it could succeed and eventually it did.

Fire phone was one of Amazon's many experiments. It failed sure, but hey you miss 100% of the changes you don't take.

> The cloud service didn't take a life on its own - in the very early days there was just EC2 and S3, nothing else

Just a minor point of correction: Actually SQS was first.

https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/aws-blog-the-first-five-yea...

In what way is the billions of dollars Amazon is spending on original content "just an extention to feeding the retailing monster"?

It's easy to point to one failed product as proof that "straying too far doesn't work", if you can do the mental gymnastics required to classify all their successful products as somehow more connected to their original goal.

IMO you do have a good point: Nothing about Prime seems to play particularly to Amazon's strengths, other than the wide reach of their sales channels (but if that's an argument, you could as well have Walmart doing the same). This is especially visible when you compare their software to Netflix. Still light years ahead of Apple though.

Prime Video is a benefit of Prime. I have Amazon Prime for the shipping benefits. I appreciate the video side, but I wouldn't pay $99/year for it.

I think it's more that most don't see Amazon's actual core competence. Amazon is a logistics business, both information and physical. They do logistics for themselves for various front-ends (amazon.com, echo, video, kindle, etc.) but you can view all of those as accessories to their AWS, warehousing, and shipping business which they provide both for their own front ends and for sale to anyone.

If you define "core competence" sufficiently vaguely then sure, everything can be related to that core competence.

"a logistics business, both information and physical"? Really? Calling their massive retail business, original content, and physical devices an "accessory" to their warehousing is an extremely myopic view of Amazon.

Remember that much of what is sold on Amazon.com is not actually sold by Amazon. Amazon provides warehousing and fulfillment and an online storefront for third party sellers as well as for itself. The tools that it uses to run that online storefront in the form of AWS are used by many non-Amazon websites as well. The Kindle ecosystem helps Amazon sell retail books but also provides a self-publishing platform. It's not unreasonable to say that logistics, warehousing and web services are the real business, and that Amazon's retail business is one of many customers.

Might as well call Apple an "electronics business, both small and large."

Amazon sells retail themed logistics. Apple sells consumer computing themed user experience.

What does Yamaha sell?

Nothing, business. It's a conglomerate. A business that's function is running businesses. A Yamaha piano has nothing at all to do with a Yamaha motorcycle exactly opposite to how all of Amazon's services are related and intertwined.

Steve Yegge's Platform Rant is still relevant, I think.

https://plus.google.com/+RipRowan/posts/eVeouesvaVX