Ben Gilbert: uncertainty

Transcript context

…Okay, fun. All right, it launches. The last thing to highlight here is the importance of the primitives. I don't know how intentional it was in the moment, but it became something that later on would become hugely important to them, which is that they truly were unopinionated about this as a platform. They said, we're going to launch with primitives. It's the most basic story that's the most basic compute, it's the most basic way to host your databases, it's the most basic CDN, and we can't wait to see what developers build in an innovative way with our absolute bare bones architecture, that would go on to be called Infrastructure as a Service as a category. Again, I do not know if it was an intentional thing or not when they were first launching it. But they did not say, let's try and build a new OS, a new programming paradigm. No, we're just going to give you super basic building blocks, and you run with it. All that's on the technical side we've been spending a lot of time there. We've alluded to this, but let's talk about what a radical innovation this was on the business and market side. I've got a great quote here. " When S3 launched," probably at the same time that you were playing around with it, "a truly world class, fantastic engineer at Microsoft at the time by the name of James Hamilton,” who's now an S-Team member and SVP Distinguished Engineer at Amazon, “because of what he saw with AWS, he wrote on his personal blog about trying out S3 when it launched with a personal project" Here's a quote from him. "What was even more disruptive was a credit card was all that was needed to provision storage. There was no required proposal for financial approval. There was no RFP, no vendor selection process, no vendor negotiation, and no datacenter space needed to be found. I could just sign up and start working from deciding to write the app to it being up and running on the Internet was measured in days. After debugging and testing extensively, the end of the month rolled around and I got my visa bill. Of course, I knew abstractly, that S3 was disruptively priced. But when I saw that my bill for the entire development and test of this application was $3.08, it just seemed wrong. Once development was complete, I was still storing all the test data in S3. The following month, I got a bill for $0.07."…

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