Review: Working Backwards

 Working Backwards is written by two Amazon executives who'd each been at Amazon for more than 10 years. When reading business books like this, you expect the usual business guy's self-aggrandizing focus on his great decisions, his ability to work heroically, and how great his CEO was. But Working Backwards surprised me with first, how easy it was to read, and how clear and honest the authors were.

In some ways, Amazon is by far the most surprising of the FAANG companies. They weren't known for being able attract great engineers and amazing designers. They were famous for being frugal, but frugality has never been a sexy virtue in American culture. Yet over and over they beat Google at cloud computing, and search. (Yes search --- raise your hand if you've been trained to visit Amazon for product search instead of Google) But what comes through in this book is that their true secret is this: a process for making good decisions beats out even those other attributes of computing businesses.

One of my favorite examples in the book was Amazon's reaction to Apple's announcement of iTunes for Windows. If you recall, this was the announcement that music has gone digital for all computer users, not just those who had opted into Apple's walled garden. Rather than being baited into reacting immediately, Jeff Bezos pondered and thought for several months before assigning an executive to create an organization around digital goods. Fundamentally, having a single clear owner (Amazon's executives borrowed the computer science term "single threaded" and applied it to leaders) allowed the organization to work on the problem and come up with a long term solution which led to the Kindle. Note that the Kindle was a slow burn, but one that exceeded internal expectations when it sold out right away. It's also very clear that there was no way a company like Google would have had the attention span to devote to something like this, and reading was way too clearly unsexy (and unpopular) an activity to attract Apple's attention.

Another clear sign of the honesty in the book was when one of the author's excerpted from his own self-assessment for a performance review one year.  He gave himself a D for making an error in launching Amazon Unbox. Again, the explanation of the process was clear --- the advantages Amazon had in retail was in delivery and distribution, but with a digital market place, those advantages were levelled, and Amazon had to either move upstream to content creation (which it eventually did), or downstream to owning and controlling the device (which it did earlier, in parallel with creating the FireTV, Fire tablets, and eventually Amazon Echo). The analysis of that decision is well explained and again, you could see that Amazon's competitors were late.

Many of the anecdotes were relevant and clearly explained, such as the creation of the Fire Phone, and an explanation of how one of the authors built in automatic refunds for stuttering video on Amazon Prime rentals, something that I did not expect to see at the top level, but in retrospect, there was no way it could have been a 20% project done by an engineer. One cannot imagine a business leader at Apple or Google deliberately building in a feature into a product spec that would cost the company money. Just that story alone makes the book worth the time spent reading it.

The successes are also explained, such as the evolution of AWS and Amazon Prime. I think this is one of those cases where Amazon's weakness (it never could get as many good engineers as Google) was actually a strength. Amazon's monorepo broke relatively early, while Google's ability to hire good engineers ensured that even today, Google lives with a monorepo and doesn't want to move beyond it. The breakage of that monorepo forced Amazon to learn how to support REST APIs and that in turn meant that when they launched AWS they already had experience in supporting one, something that Google struggled to do.

What comes through in this book is how clear the reasoning behind those decisions are, and I attribute a lot of this to the principle at Amazon where PowerPoints are banned and 6 page narrative arguments are used instead. The book provides examples of those documents, and the process of how to use them and stories about the debates are explained. A key point is that the assumptions behind a PRD has to be written down so they can be debated, not just what the actual product is.

The ultimate secret behind this book is that this type of process is actually very difficult to adopt. Definitely something you'd want to do early on in a company's life cycle, rather than after it's gotten past the startup stage. Well worth reading. I picked up the book one Saturday afternoon and read it overnight. Highly recommended.

How Alexa captured me as a customer and dragged me into the post smartphone era

I can clearly remember when I knew I'd been captured by Garmin as a customer: it was when I bought their stupendously expensive Smart Scale, which I still use every day. I had a similar epiphany last week, when I started using Alexa on my Moto X4 instead of Google Assistant.

Here's what happened. During Prime Day, I snagged an Audible membership for about $5/month for 3 months. I used it to buy several audio books, all of which were quite long. Google Assistant can start Audible, but for whatever reason it's unable to tell it to resume playing the last book I was listening to. Alexa on the Moto X4, however, not only can do that, but can also fetch the book I want to listen to by title and resume at the last known point. I took a look at the app and to my surprise, what the Alexa app on Android phone doesn't do is to start Audible and start the book, but instead, directly streams the audio from Amazon's server by itself without starting that app! Not only does this mean I don't need to have the Audible app (I do anyway so that I can cache books on the SD card), the latency is also much lower than having Google Assistant start the Google Music app and have it start playing. I haven't tried, but I'm pretty sure the Alexa app also streams music directly without starting the Amazon music app.

I shouldn't have been surprised, but because of my history working for Google and using Google products, I knew that in a million years, no Google product manager would take this approach. I systematically broke down how I ended up with no less than 3 Alexa products in regular use: the Fire TV Cube, the Echo Dot, and now my Moto X4. The Echo Dot was the easiest to explain: it was so Bowen could listen to audio books (again, from Audible).

The Fire TV Cube turned out to be a great entertainment center control device, and now replaces our Logitech Harmony Smart Control Hub, which I sold. Google doesn't have an equivalent unit, because to have one would be to acknowledge that other devices exist outside the Google eco-system, which apparently is a no-no, leading to the elimination of the headphone jack/audio output port from not just Google's phones, but also the Google Home smart speaker series of devices. Which meant that the nice speakers in the living room are now "owned" by Alexa, and so my wife added an Amazon Music subscription, even though all my personal music was sync'd to Google Music. Doubling down on higher end audio, Amazon is even launching an amplifier that supports Alexa.

Similarly, I ended up using Amazon Photos for RAW photo backup, because it was already folded into the Amazon Prime subscription, which bundled in TV shows for the kids that are turning out to be very good. And because of that Prime subscription (as well as the huge collection of books on Amazon), we now have 2 Fire HD8 tablets that the kids use as general purpose Android tablets as well as just video streaming.

I scratched my head as to how Amazon ended up with me as a loyal customer despite my background, and I realized that this was where Amazon's product design/product managers trumped Google's superior engineering. Sure, Alexa is not bilingual, while Google Home/Voice Assistant is. But since all that speech recognition is done in the cloud anyway, I'm comfortable waiting for Amazon to implement it eventually (or if it doesn't, we've learned to live with the limitations). But not having a device that can hook up to our entertainment system meant that Google Home speakers was never in the running for the living room. You can't upgrade hardware that doesn't have the proper I/O channels, while you can easily upgrade software in the cloud!

Similarly, not having a decent e-book reader meant that the default e-book reader of choice was always the Amazon Kindle, which has superb integration for my favorite book vendor of choice, the local library. And ever since Google abandoned the low end Nexus 7 tablets in pursuit of Apple-like prices (and presumably profit-margins) for Android tablets, that meant that the tablets would default to Amazon's ecosystem as well, since no one else is selling decent tablets at $50 each.

What would I do if I was a Google product manager trying to counter this onslaught? There are probably some things Google will never do, like produce a decent e-reader, so that's probably out. But bringing back a decent low-end Android tablet is probably something Google can do, since it has done so in the past. I'd bundle Google's services: Google shopping express, Youtube Red (or whatever it's called), Google Drive storage/Google Docs should all be bundled in together in one price. Put out a Fire TV Cube equivalent with sufficient control for other devices in the living room (an I/R blaster is enough) Even all that might not be enough, but at least it would make it feel like Google is trying. As it is, it definitely feels like Google doesn't have a coherent, integrated strategy where everything fits together, while Amazon does (and at a very high value to price ratio!). Google's strategy feels like a company that's chasing after Apple's customers, but with none of the integration, social prestige, and marketing prowess that Apple puts into its efforts.

Review: Amazon Photos

I have a storage array at home that stores 1.8TB of photos. The edited photos go up on Google Photos and Facebook Photos (at the free tier resolutions), but the RAW files have been staying at home, and started getting nervous about off-site backups. I was getting all ready to pay up for SmugMug, but one day Amazon helpfully reminded me that unlimited photo storage (at full native RAW resolution) came along with Amazon Prime, which we were paying for anyway!

I proceeded to download the native Windows app, installed it, and pointed it at all the folders (including some network folders) and it started uploading at my full comcast speed of about 150GB/day. Note that Comcast will give you 2 free months of overage over 1TB, so if you're going to do this, make sure you start at the 1st of a month.

To give you an idea of what it would cost on rival services, Google would charge $10/month for 2TB ($120 per year), and Smugmug would charge $35/year. But seriously? I'm not going to point someone viewing my photos at a site that's starting with smugmug! Since we have a FireTV Cube, we can now see our photos on the big 4K display by talking to Alexa.

To be honest, I'd been looking at cancelling our Prime subscription. Since the kids have pretty much outgrown diapers (for a while the savings from Amazon mom on diapers more than covered the cost of a Prime subscription), 2 day delivery never seemed worth $120/year. But take $40 off that (and for the kids shows that they watch), now Amazon Prime starts to look like a decent deal again.

In any case, if you're an Amazon  Prime member and need off-site photo storage, you might as well use it!

Amazon's customer focus blows my mind

Amazon's customer focus blows my mind, especially as someone who knows how the sausage gets made at big companies. One day, I was watching an Amazon rental movie at home. Bowen would come and interrupt me, I'd pause the video, play with  him or answer his question, and then unpause. This happened so frequently that day that I eventually gave up on the movie.

The next day, I got an e-mail to the effect of: "We noticed you had poor quality video last night. We're giving you your money back."

This blew my mind. Somewhere at Amazon, there was a project to detect poor quality streaming and refund customers. The ROI on that project was negative: if the project succeeded, Amazon would lose money. Google for sure doesn't do this. Neither does Apple, as far as I know. It just boggles my mind that anyone would greenlight a project whose entire purpose was to return money to its customers.

My guess is that ultimately, the ROI must be positive, because even cheapskates like me notice excellent service and will buy more from Amazon as a result. But good luck getting big data to pick up on stuff like that and justify a costly software engineering project. I am in awe.