Engineering teams at Amazon does indeed have a lot of autonomy. I have been part of multiple teams over a fairly long periods of time (7+ years), and it's been my experience every time. There were times when it felt like each team was its own start up, at least when it came to deciding what to build / prioritize.
Agreed, engineering teams are effectively stable startups. You make your own decisions & get compete for funding (recs), while delivering products for other teams. If your team is unable to deliver for a customer team, they might make the solution themselves, and then end of with more recs (growing startup), at which point their team may break up into 2 teams if it gets to large. On the flip side, if you see a need within your greater org or company, you can get buy-in and build a great product for the teams around you.
At least in engineering, there's quite a lot of autonomy. Senior leaders set the overall vision/objective, but in the end it is up the engineers and product managers to figure out what actually to work on.
I agree. These are consulting platitudes and can be ignored. The real reasons Amazon is successful:
* They ship super fast
* They sell almost everything at reasonable prices
* They have more user-provided content (reviews, photos) than anyone
I think there are real, deterministic reasons why Amazon is successful (other than its unscrupulous practices) but I'm not sure your comment adequately covers them. It's hard to make these determinations post hoc because they are not easily falsifiable.