Amazon is an outlier, where each business runs its profit/loss, and higher-ups act as VCs. Wish more companies were like that, but you need to take a lot of bets to make that work.
AWS worked, but the Fire phone turned out to be a write-off.
If anything, AWS looks like the outlier compared to their other projects. It only survived because of the sheer size of Amazon.com and was built to accommodate that traffic and deployment. If they set out to create AWS without the need for it, don’t think it would’ve made it this far. Even after all these years, AWS is the breadwinner, while the website it was made for can barely turn a profit and resorts to increase the price of prime every year to show revenue growth.
