"A fascinating way to look at our business!" - Peter

Excerpts from "The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the age of Amazon" by Brad Stone

Chapter 7 - A Technology Company, Not a Retailer

Bezos was getting annoyed as well. The company had improved on its pick-to-light system in the FCs, and its infrastructure had been successfully recast into component services, but the provisioning of computer resources remained a bottleneck. It got so dysfunctional that project leaders would present the S Team with their six-page narratives and then in the discussion afterward admit they had been unable to actually test their projects. Rick Dalzell recalls a particularly significant meeting when Matt Round, the head of Personalization at the time, complained that he didn’t have resources for experimentation. “Jeff finally just exploded at me,” Dalzell says. “I always handled Jeff’s outbursts pretty well, but to be honest about it, he had a right to be angry. We were stifling the flow of creativity. Even though we were probably faster than ninety-nine percent of companies in the world, we were still too slow.”

At the same time, Bezos became enamored with a book called Creation, by Steve Grand, the developer of a 1990s video game called Creatures that allowed players to guide and nurture a seemingly intelligent organism on their computer screens. Grand wrote that his approach to creating intelligent life was to focus on designing simple computational building blocks, called primitives, and then sit back and watch surprising behaviors emerge. Just as electronics are built from basic components like resistors and capacitors, and as living beings spring from genetic building blocks, Grand wrote that sophisticated AI can emerge from cybernetic primitives, and then it’s up to the “ratchet of evolution to change the design.”

The book, though dense and challenging, was widely discussed in the book clubs of Amazon executives at the time and it helped to crystallize the debate over the problems with the company’s own infrastructure. If Amazon wanted to stimulate creativity among its developers, it shouldn’t try to guess what kind of services they might want; such guesses would be based on patterns of the past. Instead, it should be creating primitives—the building blocks of computing—and then getting out of the way. In other words, it needed to break its infrastructure down into the smallest, simplest atomic components and allow developers to freely access them with as much flexibility as possible. As Bezos proclaimed at the time, according to numerous employees: “Developers are alchemists and our job is to do everything we can to get them to do their alchemy.”

 

Bezos directed groups of engineers in brainstorming possible primitives. Storage, bandwidth, messaging, payments, and processing all made the list. In an informal way—as if the company didn’t quite know the insight around primitives was an extraordinary one—Amazon then started building teams to develop the services described on that list.