Innovation@Amazon : A Technologist’s Musings

Prelude :

There are many ways to talk about innovation — one obvious direction is to compare and contrast between the broader categories of Innovation, for example Disruptive vs Sustaining. In fact, I am a fan of Prof. Christensen and his work on Disruptive Innovation and have done lectures at the Naval Post Graduate School on Disruptive Innovation. But in this context, I am going to be more pragmatic and focus on what I see as innovations from Amazon and further, discuss areas for Amazon to innovate.

Innovation @Amazon:

In many ways, I like and respect Amazon, a company very similar to Apple. Both companies have perfected the art of understanding their customers and providing innovative products and services. But the innovation at Amazon is much broader and deeper, while Apple has focused on a narrow set of products.

When it comes to innovation, one might be tempted to talk about Google’s ProjectX portfolio including Intergalactic networks (https://goo.gl/PwKQtV), translation engines, AlphaGo from DeepMind and autonomous cars. While Amazon’s innovations in cloud computing rank in par with the Project X portfolio, Amazon’s advances in retail & logistics, recent innovations in object detection (DeepLens) and voice/sound (Alexa) and the use of robotics in warehousing are often not widely mentioned. Interestingly Amazon was #1 in Fast Company’s List of most innovators in 2018; so, the pundits do recognize the breadth and depth of innovation@amazon.

Most of the innovations@amazon have an iceberg-like subtleness; 90% is hidden underneath a set of unpretentious interfaces, services and devices. I have been a customer of Amazon for two decades — of course, the shopping experience is very smooth and the customer service quintessential. Interestingly I haven’t thought about the innovations behind them, until now ! I have been building systems on aws and now, looking at the wide spectrum of aws services, the innovation is very apparent.

One common thread across the innovations@amazon is the deep understanding of the customers and also a deep-rooted philosophy of moving at the speed of customers. While the innovations are released in a phased manner for the customers to absorb, the conceptual process starts much earlier.

Amazon has the organizational culture and the will to envision that one day the company will deliver a Harry Potter book at 12:00 AM of the day of release; the same company was able to conceive and deliver an 18’ container, called Snowmobile, capable of handling petabytes of data with armed security!

While it is easier to envision ideas, it is harder to nurture, prune, develop and finally deliver the innovations — Amazon definitely has the internal mechanisms to follow thru with the innovations. Looking at the Amazon Leadership Principles, it is obvious how the organizational bias for innovation is ingrained in the way the company works, for example “Think Big”, “Dive Deep”, “Bias For Action” are all conducive to innovation.

Moving on, as one ponders about the next set of innovations from Amazon, one can wonder as well as propose. Am taking the latter route.

• One domain that only Amazon can deliver, is this notion of ubiquitous intelligence, specifically the common sense that we all possess as well as an understanding of the things happening around us. Basically, a knowledge graph of the human experience, the factoids, the unwritten rules and even our aspirations and sorrows. There are many reasons why Amazon is the best choice for “Intelligent” consumer products & services, let me iterate a few. First, this knowledge graph will be consumed by the devices and systems that interact with consumers — the robots that play and teach kids, the devices that interact with MS patients and manage their reading, the systems that keep elderly company, monitor their health and even entertain them, a semantic Go game teaching engine that can actually infer and adjust according to the expertise of the user (blog), and may be one day, a source for knowledge and intelligence for anyone to build a “JARVIS” — a pervasive CloudIntelligence! As this intelligence touches the consumer, a customer-centric organization like Amazon is the best company to deliver this stack — Amazon understands the customer, can move at their pace and innovate at different levels at the same time. It is a delicate balance, especially with the augmented intelligence robots which have to understand the human species and adjust in myriad subtle ways. As I wrote in my blog , current machines do not understand the semantics of human experience, and Amazon is the company that can build that substrate that lets them grok the human species. Second reason for Amazon to be the best to innovate on intelligence is because Amazon also understands the developer eco system viz. the services, APIs and the object models. Third, of course, is the breadth and depth of the computing and storage resources that aws has. One day, this navigable intelligence stack will be as pervasive as electricity and aws !
• Another related domain for Amazon to innovate is the conversational systems, even full-fledged home robots that provide augmented intelligence, companionship, teaching and so forth. The Alexa brand is moving there — am interested more about the future vectors Amazon is thinking about. It is not only the voice but also the computer vision — the deeplens is promising but haven’t seen a seamless integration with the Alexa brand as well as a unified conversation stack — not a command interface or a dialogue or a Q & A.
• Another important area that requires Amazon’s attention is the environment, specifically recycling systems that span the globe, solution for the great pacific garbage patch et al. I really believe that if Amazon puts its innovative, thoughtful, systemic & pragmatic approach we would have very effective recycling across the globe. In many ways recycling is a consumer problem which requires the customer focus that only Amazon can provide.

Epilogue:

In short, Amazon’s innovation reminds one of magic that is indistinguishable from advanced technologies; amazon has many rabbits in its hat (aws, kindle, Alexa, Prime, to name a few) where the company has interwoven a deep understanding of consumers and technologies to shift the paradigms.

My hope is that Amazon expands it’s innovation machine to a larger portfolio of augmented intelligence and environment.