The creation of EC2 originally (which at the time was not AWS -- AWS was originally the XML-RPC and SOAP APIs that allowed people to interact with the www.amazon.com website) was done by a skunkworks project in South Africa. That team was very, very far removed from Amazon proper and actually delivered.
That's probably the only time I've seen that kind of startup-with-a-large-corporation work. I can think of other examples (like Amazon's google-competing search engine) which tried to copy that and failed pretty completely.
I suspect other successful things that happened after I was there were run as "startups" though (I'd guess Alexa?).
But in general every other time I've seen those happen at other companies they've been completely miserable failures.
Working in IT, usually those "startups" are full of Dunning Krugers who mostly go to war against the corporate IT and don't actually have very good business ideas (and honestly the corporate IT has been run like crap and deserved it, but that doesn't actually help launch your product). They're usually fed a bunch of ego-food about how they're the special children which will entirely transform the next generation of the company, and then they wind up fighting with everyone else.
> The creation of EC2 originally (which at the time was not AWS -- AWS was originally the XML-RPC and SOAP APIs that allowed people to interact with the www.amazon.com website) was done by a skunkworks project in South Africa.
AWS did indeed start out with E-commerce Services (2002) and Alexa Internet APIs (2004), but in mid-2003, when Andy Jassy took over AWS from Colin Bryar, he completely changed its charter to build an "Internet Operating System" instead. EC2 happened in South Africa in 2004 after Jassy and others had ear-marked compute as one of the key building blocks, along with Storage (S3) and Database (RDS / SimpleDB). In fact, S3 launched before EC2 did. SQS launched even before that, in 2004, though in limited beta.
Yeah, it was a bit messier than that though. There was a ton of internal politics between 2004-2006, that Wikipage makes it sound way too clean. You're right though that S3 and SQS launched before EC2 did, but EC2 was highly politically charged internally. I don't know that it would have happened if they didn't ship development off to South Africa.
That's probably the only time I've seen that kind of startup-with-a-large-corporation work. I can think of other examples (like Amazon's google-competing search engine) which tried to copy that and failed pretty completely.
I suspect other successful things that happened after I was there were run as "startups" though (I'd guess Alexa?).
But in general every other time I've seen those happen at other companies they've been completely miserable failures.
Working in IT, usually those "startups" are full of Dunning Krugers who mostly go to war against the corporate IT and don't actually have very good business ideas (and honestly the corporate IT has been run like crap and deserved it, but that doesn't actually help launch your product). They're usually fed a bunch of ego-food about how they're the special children which will entirely transform the next generation of the company, and then they wind up fighting with everyone else.