I don't think this is very true, they are just very good at turning around and selling the internal tech.
The underlying technology for AWS was developed internally and it was not customer facing at first.
Similarly if you look at their internal data platforms, they have invested heavily even though it's not customer facing (yet, because eventually they will start selling services inspired by the internal systems via AWS).
I remember watching a presentation on how they invested large amounts of money into prototyping FC robotics technologies.
If you look at AWS Kinesis or EventBridge, the technologies were developed for internal usage before they were sold. There is also considerable investment into distributed consensus technologies that hasn't been turned directly into products (yet).
You're kind of right in that Amazon doesn't spend much time working on greenfield projects that don't have any forseeable business value (in contrast to say Google), but that is in many way a product of their organizational structure where two-pizza teams are supposed to do 'research' as part of their product work rather than having a pure R&D division.
Will this myth ever die?
https://www.networkworld.com/article/2891297/the-myth-about-...
Plus, AWS no longer use such narrative anyway.
https://www.se-radio.net/2014/12/episode-216-adrian-cockcrof...
Edit: that’s not the right podcast. This was before he went to AWS. I can’t for the life of me find the interview.
But if someone with deeper insight than someone who has been working at Amazon/AWS for -3 days (I start Monday), I’m glad to be proven wrong.
So, even without a mandate, the market forces at play in terms of proposing roadmap projects and choosing what to invest in, will naturally tend to favor those solutions with can pull double-duty (solve an immediate problem/pain-point that Amazon already has, and with a clear path/potential to be converted into or evolve into an external sell-able service too).
[1] https://medium.com/slingr/what-year-did-bezos-issue-the-api-...
Unsurprising since Bezos himself worked in a Hedge fund. The Autonomous Driving hype train is slowing down, so this is the perfect opportunity for this move.
Interestingly, with this move, Bezos can soon rival Musk for the next 'billionaire super genius rock star' position.
I've been quite dismissive of Blue Origin in the past, their pace of development seemed so sluggish compared to SpaceX, but I think that was somewhat unfair. It seems Bezos only really started pouring money into the project a few years ago though. BE-34 does seem to be behind schedule, or at least the launch vehicles are by a year or two, but that's par for the course for big rockets.
He funds blue origin with more than a billion $ every year from the sales of his own amazon stock. Without amazon filling his pockets he can't finance blue origin.
He puts more of his money in blue origin every year than the amount amazon will pay for zoox
Zoox in particular was a LARP of an autonomous driving company. Until any of these companies start manufacturing, they’re literally LARPing. At least Tesla shipped an actual product.
Anyhow, I haven't seen the trend of calling out an entity as being a LARPer. But I have to admit, it's kind of funny. It does make me giggle :)
Not really sure how you're using "squeeze" here, but Instagram and Whatsapp were both, with the benefit of hindsight, phenomenally successful acquisitions.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-amazon-ivona/amazon-buys-...
>Amazon to acquire Yap, move into speech recognition?
https://www.theverge.com/2011/11/9/2550764/amazon-acquires-y...
>Amazon has reportedly acquired Evi for voice-guided search
https://www.engadget.com/2013-04-17-amazon-may-have-quietly-...
I think Annapurna was more strategic than you think.
* James Hamilton in 2010: https://perspectives.mvdirona.com/2010/10/datacenter-network...
* Annapurna acquired in 2015.
* In 2017 they reveal that every EC2 server has a Nitro (Annapurna) chip for networking: http://www.brendangregg.com/blog/2017-11-29/aws-ec2-virtuali...
Chips are peculiar because they matter a lot in a customer facing way but they are not a 100% transparent feature. I think AWS customers couldn’t care less what their instances are powered by as long as they are 1) Fast 2) Cheap 3) Secure. But the chip happens to influence those things heavily, so they become almost like referential values to aggregate those characteristics in a way that’s easy to market.
But here is an interesting take. Amazon is an formidable acquirer and probably the only big-tech that knows how to squeeze from their M&A activity.
They probably saw this years ahead. Many companies were going to develop technology in this space and it was likely better to acquire one of those than to develop in-house. And the reason is very simple: Amazon doesn’t invest in greenfield projects that are not customer facing. Look it up. Almost all the behind the scenes impressive tech they have was acquired at certain time.
For example. AWS proprietary chips come from their acquisition of Annapurna Labs. All their warehouse robotics come from their acquisition of Kiva Systems.
All their modern video tech comes from their acquisition of Elemental.
Their customer facing acquisitions also play a similar playbook but in a more -fill the market gap- kind of way. “We need a supermarket, let’s buy Whole Foods”. “We need routers for the Alexa ecosystem, let’s buy Eero”.
Also kind of interesting that they are an opportunistic buyer (almost vulturous) that most of the times only pulls the trigger when the acquisition target is in their lows.