In hockey (now on Prime - Monday nights!) you hear the saying about goalies "good to be lucky; lucky to be good". That could be a summary of Jassy's career. It's no coincidence he highlights the growth of AWS over the past 10 years right up front; this coincides with his tenure and when he accelerated his climb. I don't know the man at all, but this letter is exactly like every public speech and post I've ever seen or heard from him: a bowl of plain oatmeal that's completely on-brand.

'WhyQ'

• why respect the customer's actual search query when we could auction keywords instead?

• why allow the user to sort by price when they might find a product we get lower commission on?

• why not spam 'Prime' on every page, and use dark patterns to trick users into a subscription?

• why bother with expensive safety and quality audits of third party seller products?

• why ignore our private metrics on popular third party products when we could use them to create a knockoff and drive them out of business?

Give me a way to filter out results with ads on them please.

Edit (hn doesn’t let me post this fast): is finding places to buy shit really an issue? How many times in your life have you thought “damn I know what I want to buy, I just don’t know from which site to buy it”? That’s hard to imagine of anyone. This user story just seems like a problem made up by search indexes to court capital.

Edit2: Kagi is great. I'm a full subscriber.

I feel stupid for asking, but do quotes even do anything anymore? I feel like I try them and it just gives me the same results.

I don't think you get what I mean... Mozilla made 85% of its revenue from Google in 2023 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Corporation). That goes away; who is going to pay that? 653 million income, 555 of that from Google... Google stops paying; that's 98 million left over... Their dev costs were 260 million. How do they make up the shortfall?

Why is it acceptable for front end code to be of lower quality than the rest? Your software is only as good as the lowest quality part.

Hmmm... Apple losing 22B is one thing... But what happens to Mozilla? How much could they lose? That would be worse for the community...