Jeff Bezos: AWS Will Break $10 Billion This Year (windowsitpro.com) 97
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."
Innovation and drones (Score:2)
Amazon seems to have a great culture for innovation.
Where are my delivery drones and flying cars?
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Amazon seems to have a great culture for innovation.
They seem to have some excellent tax lawyers as well.
Re:Innovation and drones (Score:5, Informative)
Kindles are just a rip off of the iPad.
Not really like for like, except for the Fire but it's not really a Kindle in my opinion. Anyway, the first Kindle was about 3 years before the first iPad.
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After owning a tablet for awhile, I have to almost agree. The tablet is great for reading and web-browsing (when the crap on the page doesn't wreak havoc on the limited resources on the tablet), but I find that I'd rather stab myself in the thigh than actually try to type anything into one without a keyboard. And if I'm doing that, why don't I just get a very light laptop?
I think tablets excel when you need something like a big graphical control panel and readout that can be touch activated or if you have
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And the iPad is just an updated Newton.
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Where are my delivery drones and flying cars?
That was what he meant about having a lot of practice failing.
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Where are my delivery drones and flying cars?
That was what he meant about having a lot of practice failing.
... or falling, as the case may be.
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No doubt the SJWs will disagree, but it rather depends on what kind of naughty bits you have.
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A profitable product from Amazon (Score:3)
Re:A profitable product from Amazon (Score:5, Insightful)
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).
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. Legal, but not morally right - in the sense that if you benefit (eg. as in making money) from a nation or other group of entities, then it is right that you pay for it to that nation/group of entities. Actually, this is a basic principle in business; there wouldn't be any business, if only one side profited from the relationship.
Re:A profitable product from Amazon (Score:5, Insightful)
Amazon has generally not being paying much tax because it reinvests much if not all of it's profits back into the business to grow it. Nothing even morally wrong about reinvesting "profits" back into the business and thus not paying tax on them. Governments in general even encourage this behaviour.
What is odd about Amazon is that they have been doing this now for 20 years.
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Not completely true.
The US government, at least, taxes any regular businesses on their profit as income, *even if it's reinvested back in the form of assets.
Amazon really isn't profitable. How do you think
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Amazon really isn't profitable. How do you think that they can afford to sell stuff cheaper than everybody else and eat the shipping?
At least here in Europe they used to do it by not paying any VAT to the state and charging you for it nonetheless. Something a physical store can't do.
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Dunno about Amazon. But Apple... remember that loan against assets outside the US to distribute a dividend to investors a couple of years back? Just so they could get off paying taxes from profits and still distribute a dividend.
Amazon Employees (Score:2)
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.
You need profits to owe taxes (Score:5, Insightful)
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
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So you find it to be 'trickery' to reinvest all profits to build more products, services, investment opportunities, even bloody jobs as opposed to using them to buy larger yachts? Interesting definition of 'trickery'.
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Taxation is immoral. Besides, it's better that capital be allocated by productive people instead of government bureaucrats.
I guess then that you would be fine without any roads, bridges, tunnels, garbage pickup, police departments, fire departments, schools, communications satellites, etc., etc.. You are either ignorant, heartless or both.
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You are either ignorant, heartless or both.
Nope. They're just a troll.
Re: A profitable product from Amazon (Score:2)
You don't make money "from a nation". You provide a product that is more valuable to people than the money they give you for the product. Both sides come away from the transaction enriched. You idiots act like what amazon is doing is something to be punished.
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What is "morally wrong" about choosing not to put money in the bank, and instead using any and all revenue for expenses, lowering costs, expanding business, and R&D?
That's just called making a business decision, and morality has the square root of jack shit to do with it.
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"and morality has the square root of jack shit to do with it." and that is exactly the problem.
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I really don't understand this idea that it's morally wrong to choose to reinvest profits into the business, rather than stuff it in a mattress or bank account. Growth is a good thing - it increases employment, and through that increases taxes paid, which increases the amounts of money available to build infrastructure, and help people that need it. You know, like Social Security, which is entirely funded by payroll tax.
Where did this idea come from that a successful business that chooses to expand is som
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Government is what our ancestors decided to call the sociopaths fighting for control
Right, no reason to improve on that.
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Government is what our ancestors decided to call the sociopaths fighting for control that were at least minimally tolerable vs open warfare.
Right, no reason to improve on that, then.
In case it wasn't willful, I'll add emphasis for your old cataracted eyes
I love it. It's funny because it's true! Or close. I'm blind as a bat.
Your side lost, BJ David.
I see what you did there.
Your side lost, BJ David. Non lords get to vote. Non landowners get to vote. Even poor white men got the vote. Blacks get to vote. Women get to vote, even gay black women get to vote. Get over it.
I think you are slightly confused about what side I'm on. I oppose lords voting. I oppose lords, period. I was playing a song to my kids yesterday with the lyric "Until all tyrants perish our work shall not be done."
If you want to overthrow the lawfully elected government
I don't want to overthrow anything. I want you to keep your government, if you want it. I just want everybody else to have the right to alter or abolish it for themselves, while you keep yours, instituting their own new government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness. I realize that's radical, but a lot of people would like to stop paying for killing brown people around the world and stuff like that and just focus on protecting their own life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness.
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Really? Taxes are now about morality? I rather thought that taxes were about the people with guns who would come to repossess my house if I didn't pay them.
Yeah, I get that infrastructure improvements and all of that are paid for by taxes. I also note that our budget in the US is trillions of dollars a year, which dwarfs any company that I am aware of anywhere. Perhaps instead of setting up a pseudo-statist religion about paying taxes, we should maybe get the government to somehow make use of the incred
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Really? Taxes are now about morality? I rather thought that taxes were about the people with guns who would come to repossess my house if I didn't pay them.
It is like this: As you say yourself, certain things are paid for via the taxes, such as infrastructure, and in many countries also education and healthcare. If you don't pay tax, but still benefit from these things, then you are essentially freeloading; whether that is immoral or not is perhaps worth discussing, but while you can excuse those who genuinely can't find the means to pay tax - for example because they are unimployed - I don't think you can excuse people who could easily afford to pay, but are
Re:A profitable product from Amazon (Score:5, Insightful)
There is a lot of pressure on their pricing, especially the storage side. Google is cheaper and Nearline is much faster (3 seconds) than Amazon's Glacier product (1 hour). Microsoft are fairly competitive too, and the integration with Visual Studio and .NET makes their platform quite attractive to many people.
Could be a while before they make any money. It's a new, rapidly developing market and they have some big competitors.
Company willing to let employees fail? (Score:2)
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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.
I would guess it depends how you fail. Trying something new to see if it has potential and failing is very different from nit being able to do the job. 3M used (still does?) to let employees spend some percentage of time and money on ideas that interested them; the theory was if only a small percentage were successful it still was a good bet and a failure in one area could turn out to be wildly successful in another. Post it notes came from a failed attempt to make a super strong adhesive and Scotch Brite r
Few people here write correct English (Score:5, Insightful)
That should be "a few".
A seemingly minor omission but it almost reverses the meaning.
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In more ambiguous cases, this kind of a mistake will change the meaning completely. Minor typos that have only one sensible interpretation are not a problem.
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I am shocked, shocked I say, that this site which gets my hard earned money can't even have editors who can do their jobs. It's at though this was some sort of free site and not a journal of towering respectability. I will have to have a word with my account manager immediately about this insulting dereliction!
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https://science.slashdot.org/story/16/03/31/1644258/study-says-people-who-continually-point-out-typos-are-jerks
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That should be "a few".
A seemingly minor omission but it almost reverses the meaning.
Really?! I got the jist just fine. You must be one of those 'jerks' mentioned in a recent Slashdotted story about people that correct/complain about typos.
Amazon isn't really being avant guard (Score:2)
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 leve
Re: seoras is really being a connard (Score:3)
It's generally a bad idea to use foreign phrases in writing when you've only heard them spoken.
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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.
Sales schmales (Score:3)
$10 billion is sales is easy. Buy stuff worth $12.5 billion and sell it at 20% off.
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I'm rather critical of Amazon's sales model, since they seem unable to turn a profit in their retail arm. However their margins in AWS are huge. Lately, Microsoft and Google have turned up the pressure, so their AWS margins might go down a bit, but they will still be around 20%.
WTF is AWS? (Score:2)
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Given that Amazon's AWS is the greatest (as in size and well-knownness) pioneer of cloud infrastructure-as-a-service and other -as-a-service things, you probably are not in the target audience of this article. It would be a bit like explaining what SystemD is in every article about it.
Twenty seconds on Google... (Score:3)
Am I alone in wondering what the heck this article is about?
Here on slashdot? Yeah pretty much...
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Nobody touch it! It's scared, can't you see? It doesn't seem to understand us.... I wonder how it got here? Someone call the police, it probably left it's cave in the mountains to find food.... poor thing...
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If anything, desktop market will only get worse... as in "Why the hell I would buy a desktop if a thin computing client is vastly cheaper?"
This will probably lead to desktop market collapse, not cheaper "fast hot desktop".
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Next up.... (Score:2)
Has it made any money yet? (Score:2)
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elementary journalism fail
Really? In a news for nerds site if you don't know what one of the three biggest cloud hosting providers is then *YOU ARE NOT THE TARGET AUDIENCE* Nerds know what AWS is. They might use it, they might hate it, but they certainly know what it is. If every article around here treated me like a special snowflake with no brain I would stop reading slashdot. Go be clueless elsewhere.
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If you honestly don't know -- http://lmgtfy.com/?q=AWS [lmgtfy.com]
Then again, if you honestly don't know, then you haven't been paying attention to anything related to the internet for at least the last 5 years. Little hint : about half of the Fortune 100 uses them for at least some of their services.
What a loss (Score:2)
Subject line reads very different if you remove the dollar sign.
The string of failed experiments (Score:2)
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.