<story><title>Amazon Home Services</title><url>https://www.amazon.com/services/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>MCRed</author><text>Remember Amazon Menus? (Scanned menus of local restaurants)
Remember Amazon Movie Listings?
Remember the &amp;quot;drone delivery&amp;quot;?  (It makes no sense on the face of it, and will never happen. But it was a big press release.)
Remember Amazon scanned catalogs (eg: Mail order catalogs selling things in competition with Amazon, that you could search)
Remember A9?  (Amazon&amp;#x27;s answer to google, biggest mainstream mention was being used as a verb once on The OC in 2006ish.)&lt;p&gt;Amazon makes dozens of &amp;quot;products&amp;quot; every year, to do press releases, to sell more Amazon stock&amp;#x2F;keep the stock price high.  Most of these products never become real.&lt;p&gt;Even AWS was a fake product-- they claimed it was &amp;quot;the infrastructure that ran Amazon.com&amp;quot;, which was a straight up lie. (I worked for the company at the time.) All they had was S3.  This product stuck to the wall and grew and became a real product over time, and so they backfilled.&lt;p&gt;This strategy works for them because when something disappears (remember google glass? Yeah, it really is gone, it made no sense to begin with, but they won&amp;#x27;t admit it) .... nobody remembers it.&lt;p&gt;Amazon wasted so much time on nonsense.  We had 4 reorgs a year and a lot of chaos because they were constantly spinning up random teams for BS initiatives -- many of whome were nothing more than a press release.&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;m not saying this is wrong (except the dishonesty about AWS)...just that Amazon announcing a product doesn&amp;#x27;t mean Amazon will be providing that product.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>dkyc</author><text>I&amp;#x27;m surprised to see this framed so negative. What they do is essentially being the &lt;i&gt;lean huge startup&lt;/i&gt;. They launch a product, gather initial feedback, and if it turns out promising (like AWS) they double-down. If it doesn&amp;#x27;t work, they kill it. I think it&amp;#x27;s actually nice to see such a rapid-iteration product development done by a company with that many resources and talent.</text></comment>
<story><title>Amazon Home Services</title><url>https://www.amazon.com/services/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>MCRed</author><text>Remember Amazon Menus? (Scanned menus of local restaurants)
Remember Amazon Movie Listings?
Remember the &amp;quot;drone delivery&amp;quot;?  (It makes no sense on the face of it, and will never happen. But it was a big press release.)
Remember Amazon scanned catalogs (eg: Mail order catalogs selling things in competition with Amazon, that you could search)
Remember A9?  (Amazon&amp;#x27;s answer to google, biggest mainstream mention was being used as a verb once on The OC in 2006ish.)&lt;p&gt;Amazon makes dozens of &amp;quot;products&amp;quot; every year, to do press releases, to sell more Amazon stock&amp;#x2F;keep the stock price high.  Most of these products never become real.&lt;p&gt;Even AWS was a fake product-- they claimed it was &amp;quot;the infrastructure that ran Amazon.com&amp;quot;, which was a straight up lie. (I worked for the company at the time.) All they had was S3.  This product stuck to the wall and grew and became a real product over time, and so they backfilled.&lt;p&gt;This strategy works for them because when something disappears (remember google glass? Yeah, it really is gone, it made no sense to begin with, but they won&amp;#x27;t admit it) .... nobody remembers it.&lt;p&gt;Amazon wasted so much time on nonsense.  We had 4 reorgs a year and a lot of chaos because they were constantly spinning up random teams for BS initiatives -- many of whome were nothing more than a press release.&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;m not saying this is wrong (except the dishonesty about AWS)...just that Amazon announcing a product doesn&amp;#x27;t mean Amazon will be providing that product.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>flyinglizard</author><text>Amazon drone delivery WILL happen. This will be completely disruptive to how stuff is consumed. Amazon being able to reach any point in an urban environment from its outskirts, at any time of day, within minutes and at a cost of just cents, will completely change consumption patterns (at least for existing Amazon users).&lt;p&gt;Once something has such a strong financial implication, any other obstacle in its way is going to crumble (not to mention that the technology is mature enough today to perform this; the barrier is regulation, and that can change with enough money at stake).</text></comment>