behind on innovation how exactly?

I listened to the earnings call. I believe the question was mostly focused on why AWS has been so behind on AI. Jassy did flub the question quite badly and rambled on for a while. The press has mentioned the botched answer in a few articles recently.

They have been pushing me and company extremely hard to vet their various AI-related offerings. When we decide to look into whatever service it is, we come away underwhelmed. It seems like their biggest selling point so far is “we’ll give it to you free for several months”. Not great.

I honestly feel bad for the folks at AWS whose job it is to sell this slop. I get AWS is in panic mode trying to catch up, but it’s just awful and frankly becoming quite exhausting and annoying for customers.

AWS was gutted by layoffs over the last couple of years. None of this is surprising.

Why feel bad for them when they don’t? The paychecks and stock options keep them plenty warm at night.

The comp might be decent but most folks I know that are still there say they’re pretty miserable and the environment is becoming toxic. A bit more pay only goes so far.

Sorry, "becoming" toxic? Amazon has been famous for being toxic since forever.

It's a perspective issue. Amazon designs the first year to not "feel" toxic to most people. Thereafter, any semblance of propriety disappears.

> stock options

Timing.

If Amazon has peaked then they will not be worth much. Shares go down. Even in rising markets shares of failing companies go down...

Mind tho, Amazon has so much mind share they will need to fail harder to fail totally...

>we come away underwhelmed

In fairness, that's been my experience with everyone except OpenAI and Anthropic where I only occasionally come out underwhelmed

Really I think AWS does a fairly poor job bringing new services to market and it takes a while for them to mature. They excel much more in the stability of their core/old services--especially the "serverless" variety like S3, SQS, Lambda, EC2-ish, RDS-ish (well, today notwithstanding)

Fascinating, thanks for sharing this.

I found this summary:

https://fortune.com/2025/07/31/amazon-aws-ai-andy-jassy-earn...

And the transcript (there’s an annoying modal obscuring a bit of the page, but it’s still readable):

https://seekingalpha.com/article/4807281-amazon-com-inc-amzn...

(search for the word “tough”)

The culture changed. When I first worked there, I was encouraged to take calculated risks. When I did my second tour of duty, people were deathly afraid of bringing down services. It has been a while since my second tour of duty, but I don't think it's back to "Amazon is a place where builders can build".

I've never heard tour of duty being used outside of the military, is it really that bad over at AWS it has to be called that?

Nah, I used to work for defense contractors, and worked with ex-military people, so...

Anyway, I actually loved my first time at AWS. Which is why I went back. My second stint wasn't too bad, but I probably wouldn't go back, unless they offered me a lot more than what I get paid, but that is unlikely.

Somewhat inevitable for any company as they get larger. Easy to move fast and break things when you have 1 user and no revenue. Very different story when much of US commerce runs you on.

If you bring something down in a real way, you can forget about someone trusting you with a big project in the future. You basically need to switch orgs

Curious. When did AWS hit “Day Two”, or what year was your 2nd tour of duty?

When they added the CM bar raiser, I felt like it hit day 2. When was that? 2014ish?

For folks who came of age in the late 00's, seeing companies once thought of as disruptors and innovators become the old stalwarts post-pandemic/ZIRP has been quite an experience.

Maybe those who have been around longer have seen this before, but its the first time for me.

It's easy to be a hero when the going is easy.