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I thought Amazon's empire rests on AWS which actually funds the company allowing them to make a sustained loss on their retail business despite attempts to automate with robotics and ML.
I thought Amazon's empire rests on AWS which actually funds the company allowing them to make a sustained loss on their retail business despite attempts to automate with robotics and ML.
It's basically the opposite? The retail business funds all the other projects. That's starting to shift, but only recently.
https://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-web-services-cloud-on...
AWS makes all the money, everything else is marginal.
> Amazon Web Services, which accounted for about 89% of Amazon's $1 billion total operating profit this past quarter. That's despite AWS accounting for just 10% of the company's overall revenue during the same time frame.
> But despite all of this, Amazon generates just a fraction of its net earnings from e-commerce. Instead, Amazon's bread and butter is its cloud computing segment, Amazon Web Services (AWS).
I ran Kindle software Product Management for 3 years. Left in 2014 AMA about the memo process or OP1/OP2 process.
I thought Amazon's empire rests on AWS which actually funds the company allowing them to make a sustained loss on their retail business despite attempts to automate with robotics and ML.
I thought Amazon's empire rests on AWS which actually funds the company allowing them to make a sustained loss on their retail business despite attempts to automate with robotics and ML.
No, it's the opposite.
https://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-web-services-cloud-on...
AWS makes all the money, everything else is marginal.
> Amazon Web Services, which accounted for about 89% of Amazon's $1 billion total operating profit this past quarter. That's despite AWS accounting for just 10% of the company's overall revenue during the same time frame.
> But despite all of this, Amazon generates just a fraction of its net earnings from e-commerce. Instead, Amazon's bread and butter is its cloud computing segment, Amazon Web Services (AWS).
> AMAZON’S SIX-PAGE memos are famous. Executives must write one every year, laying out their business plan. Less well known is that these missives must always answer one question in particular: how are you planning to use machine learning? Responses like “not much” are, according to Amazon managers, discouraged. I think company culture & talent make a big difference here. At most companies this would run the risk of…
At most companies this would run the risk of poorly shoe-horning ML into a bunch of applications and making everything needlessly complex & expensive without seeing improved results (same goes for blockchain). Sure, and in Amazon, you get a few tweaks that get the company a few bucks. It suspect the article wildly overstates the value of ML to Amazon. Amazon's success seems to rest on: A. Attracting enough capital to…
For me, this was evident from the fact that quite literally everything was automated:
Physical SKU distribution was allocated by an algorithm, optimizing for space density and picker path length. Pickers carried trackers to enable the data to constantly be gathered and algo performance reassessed.
Prices were automated in real-time
Inventory management and purchasing was automated and humans were there to override when necessary.
Kiva was purchased and applied to implement an inventory store that can self-reorganize in real-time
At least in my mind, this goes far beyond the token "we do A/B testing on UX" that other webshops do.
Worth also mentioning that Amazon did collaborative filtering on book recommendation way before it was trendy to do...
When I squint, it feels like Bezos had some image of some giant razor thin machine (quite literally) selling commodity goods, constantly capitalizing on competitors' inefficiencies. I can't help but feel this was inspired by his time spent at DE Shaw...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
How can someone become a CTO without having any clue about tech?
In a big enough company where software isn't the product that just means they know the tech that applies to that company. The CIO is probably a fearful late career IT politician and the CTO could have spent 40 years progressively learning more about washing machines or planes.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I have worked with a lot of CTOs or similar. Sometimes CTO is a title that can approve large budgets and an effective CTO is actually their direct report. Being a CTO is less about technology and more about understanding the global technical landscape, accounting and legal implications to large budget decision making. If I, for example, choose Microsoft as a vendor will that impact our Pacific market and if so what i…
Sure but sometimes this lack of knowledge will cripple a company. I've had a VP(who had a role similar to the cto for the department) who picked what time series database we should use based on this technology being the best one from a business standpoint. Unfortunately the technology was so bad from a technical standpoint that every single project that used it had it's budget and timeline explode 4-6x. This seems li…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I have worked with a lot of CTOs or similar. Sometimes CTO is a title that can approve large budgets and an effective CTO is actually their direct report. Being a CTO is less about technology and more about understanding the global technical landscape, accounting and legal implications to large budget decision making. If I, for example, choose Microsoft as a vendor will that impact our Pacific market and if so what i…
Sure but sometimes this lack of knowledge will cripple a company. I've had a VP(who had a role similar to the cto for the department) who picked what time series database we should use based on this technology being the best one from a business standpoint. Unfortunately the technology was so bad from a technical standpoint that every single project that used it had it's budget and timeline explode 4-6x. This seems li…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
There is also the story of Amazon mandating that all internal systems communicate with each other through APIs. I think leadership at Amazon has good technical knowledge so they can develop these strategies and see them through. In my company nobody with a "C*O" title (including CIO and CTO) has any clue about tech so they are very susceptible to snake oil salesmen telling them things like "we must do ML". So they te…
How can someone become a CTO without having any clue about tech?