If there’s one thing that surprised me at AWS during my time there - over a decade ago now - that I was not clearly expecting in advance, it was the scale and competence of the units fulfilling the colossal and unceasing growth in capacity demand.

This led me to reconsider Amazon as a whole, and I still think of it basically as a logistics firm, with the shop and the public cloud merely a monetisation thereof.

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TurdF3rguson 2 hours ago | parent [-]

I wonder how that translates to Blue Origin and how they managed to be so completely outclassed by SpaceX.

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anonymousiam an hour ago | parent [-]

SpaceX had been doing their thing for a while before Blue Origin got started. It seems to me that Bezos never wanted to try to catch up with Musk. His approach is not "move fast and break things", but instead more old-school (try to get things done right as best you can, and only test when necessary). Despite the gap, Bezos is slowly gaining ground. He's flying passengers and he's winning government contracts. The USG likes to have a second source for everything, and they're fed up with Northrop, Boeing, Lockheed, ULA (who have all absorbed some of the other space and launch startups). So Bezos is capitalizing on the US government's desire to have real competition, and a second source for launch (besides ULA).

There's also this funny outcome from the SpaceX IPO: https://x.com/ICannot_Enough/status/2065449141946253390

	▲	hvb2 an hour ago \| parent [-]
		> Despite the gap, Bezos is slowly gaining ground. He's flying passengers and he's winning government contracts. He's flying passengers? They stopped new shepherd and that was suborbital to begin with. You can't compare the 2 at all. Getting people to orbit is much much harder than 'a hop'. On the government contracts, yes they did get some. Some through lawyers though and they still have to show that they can actually deliver. SpaceX has to deliver on HLS as well, but the ISS has one American ride up and that's crew dragon.