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-...
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.