"Ex-Amazonian urges Google to sample Amazon's secret sauce"

October 12, 2011 | by Ted Samson | InfoWorld
A Comment...

Amazon could be more innovative like Google and Google could be more organized like Amazon.

Sounds like they both need to make in-depth information about their respective products easier to find by their developers and support staff. Google is the undisputed master of keyword search so they have half the problem solved. The other half is continuing to perfect their structured data where the right answer can be located much more quickly than exploring a lot of hits from keyword searches.

Because new hires learning the products are actively engaged in assimilating new information, their pattern-matching skills are in overdrive. That makes them great at recognizing similarities that can be recoded into a single routine and put in libraries to be reused.

Just because it's in a library though, doesn't mean it will be used. As much, and often more, effort is thus put into cataloging, thorough hyperlinking and other mechanisms to make all that information a few clicks away.

To be reusable, code must be 100% reliable, 200% documented and 300% easier to use. If it's not, developers will write their own.

Amazon's "platform oriented culture" has (hopefully) created a new profit center for them to keep paying the bills since they don't have Google's massive advertising revenues and their founding product -- book sales -- has a bleak future.

Google's "product oriented culture" keeps them innovative while, so far at least, advertising pays the bills. Most of their eggs are in that advertising basket though. Leveraging their massive infrastructure, creative talent and socially responsible policies to provide large-scale computing resources provides another source of revenue (and makes the world a better place at the same time).