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Jeff Bezos: AWS Will Break $10 Billion This Year (windowsitpro.com)
v3rgEz writes: Jeff Bezos is bullish on the cloud, pegging AWS' sales for this year at $10 billion in a recent letter to shareholders. But he said there was a surprising source of that success: The company's willingness to fail. That said, with AWS now spanning 70 different services, Amazon can afford to fail some as long as few, like EC2 and S3, keep winning. Bezos wrote: "One area where I think we are especially distinctive is failure. I believe we are the best place in the world to fail (we have plenty of practice!), and failure and invention are inseparable twins. To invent you have to experiment, and if you know in advance that it's going to work, it's not an experiment. Most large organizations embrace the idea of invention, but are not willing to suffer the string of failed experiments necessary to get there."
Amazon seems to have a great culture for innovation.
Where are my delivery drones and flying cars?
Innovation and invention are two different things. And worship is neither sufficient nor necessary to get either.
I wonder if the AWS business will actually lead Amazon to make a profit, I've read so much about how they never make a profit in the news, I seriously wonder if this could be the tipping point (product).
It's one thing if Bezos is ok with the company failing for a strategic product/service that was his decision. I wonder if he's as forgiving when the failure rests on someone else within the company.
That should be "a few".
A seemingly minor omission but it almost reverses the meaning.
At the bottom of the
It's a message to the whole company not just the shareholders.
If you have a corporate culture of arse covering no one takes risks and failures are exploited for personal gain and power building.
You end up with a stagnant enterprise caused by internal fragmentation.
To change that you need a system where everyone buys into a gamble, or commercial sandbox.
From the very top of the organisation it is understood that no blame will be used against anyone.
Instead failure is reviewed and mined for data at every level in the chain of command.
Assumptions and unknowns are removed and everyone moves on.
It has to come from the very top and the shareholders need to buy into this mindset too.
Google and Apple have been following this model for a while, Amazon isn't really being avant guard in this respect.
Of course it will when you charge me $250 for two days of hosting a test database when I was just checking out AWS features...
No doubt the SJWs will disagree, but it rather depends on what kind of naughty bits you have.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
It's generally a bad idea to use foreign phrases in writing when you've only heard them spoken.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Why are Americans so unbelievably stupid?
Why are you so unbearably snobbish?
I think you mean "as long as A few, like EC2 and S3, keep winning."
I think you mean "as long as a few, like EC2 and S3, keep winning." Capitalising the article in the middle of the sentence is simply incorrect.
The original phrase has a completely different meaning. But then, you're AMERICANS. Cretins.
Either you are not so good at grammar as you imagine, or you are a poor typist. But then, you're an ASSHOLE. Cretin.
'The Economy' is a giant Ponzi scheme whose most pitiable suckers are the youngest among us and the yet-unborn.
$10 billion is sales is easy. Buy stuff worth $12.5 billion and sell it at 20% off.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Well thank you MISTER BASIC INTERPRETER! Reminds me of gw-basic SYNTAX ERROR!
RENUMBER!
The vast majority of their products are half baked solutions at best, but evidently getting that early user adoption keeps people loyal as long as you don't fuck up toooo much. (Mostly in reference to AWS)
Am I alone in wondering what the heck this article is about?
Donald 'Duck' Dunn: We had a band powerful enough to turn goat piss into gasoline.
Bezos is clever. He's cheaping off thin computing. I want him to win so that fast hot desktop PCs and Macs get cheap through having a larger customer base.
The purpose of existence is to make money.
If he was spelling phonetically he would have written "avont" not "avant", so it's fairly clear he has seen it written down. Maybe he just forgot how its spelled. That's far more forgiveable than making unwarranted assumptions just so you can be a smart-arse IMO.
Am I alone in wondering what the heck this article is about?
Here on slashdot? Yeah pretty much...
Jeff Bezos: "Do you know who I am? I'm the man that's gonna burn your house down. WITH THE LEMONS!"
Silence is a state of mime.
hi, as a worker in one of these amazon places, i had to sit thru a ethics info mercial about insider trading, it made me smile,
Perhaps what we are talking about here is TAXABLE profit? Amazon, among others, have been in the news for not paying any tax due to what can best be described as trickery.
Amazon doesn't pay a lot of tax primarily because they don't make a lot of profit. While they definitely do some of the same shenanigans other multi-nationals engage in (and shame on them for that), Amazon doesn't do as much of it because they don't need to. They only get taxed on their profits which have been generally scant. They generate a lot of revenue but their margins aren't huge and they re-invest much of that into the company or in building products to get bigger and their primary business (online sales) isn't a fat margin business to begin with.
Unlike companies like Apple which generate huge profits but then route it through countries with low tax obligations or other overly clever schemes, Amazon just generates minimal profits by actually investing in their business. As such they don't pay a lot of tax mostly for a reason I can actually get behind - building their business. Believe me I'm hugely against companies that dodge taxes through financial engineering but I think as a general proposition there are better companies to target tax dodging rage against at the moment than Amazon.
It wouldn't surprise me if in time AWS turned into the real profit center for Amazon. I think the same thought has occurred to Amazon management
It's just someone else's computer.
Has amazon made any profits yet?
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
If you break $10 billion, you'd darn well better fix it!
I'm with you 100%. People who do that lack that jenny-say-quah.
elementary journalism fail
No, no it doesn't matter what kind of bitz. an old glass quart bottle like milk used to come in works. Glass is your friend.
what did she say?
1. fructose 2. irrelevant 3. duh
You could always use the "trucker bomb" method: http://www.nbcnews.com/id/7912...
Subject line reads very different if you remove the dollar sign.
Taxation is immoral. Besides, it's better that capital be allocated by productive people instead of government bureaucrats.
quah
Most large organizations embrace the idea of invention, but are not willing to suffer the string of failed experiments necessary to get there.
In my experience, I would have to agree. The companies where I've worked embrace the idea of making money in a world of slim margins. Lower level management says "give me base hits" but the executive level needs every hit to be an out-of-the-park home run. Fail on your own time dammit. We're paying you to be successful.
The Russians have won. They have made the world a cesspool of distrust, greed, fear and hate.
saying, "we've failed, a lot!" is not exactly a positive business image to present.
Amazon or any other big corporation does not pay taxes is a misnomer.
Such organization choose to spend this money in investment or give their money to employees as salaries and bonuses, amazon has 222K employees, if it spends half of this 10billion in employee salaries and bonuses, billions just went in taxes to the government.