Amazon has had (and continues to have) its share of failed products, a very lot of them in fact. But then that's just how they operate[1]. Given their DNA they wouldn't have been where they are without those failed experiments. One could argue it's just one of those PR angles. But it's not. My last stint at Amazon was in Kindle tablet team. And boy did they experiment with hardware! ~2012 was the year when Amazon made a conscious choice to enter the hardware market to complement their AWS offering. There were close to a dozen devices being worked upon at that time. I think about 5-6 of them failed, some didn't even launch. But then, Eco succeeded and how! And now just look at the hardware devices they have launched.
I tend to look at Amazon and Apple and wonder. Both of them are valued at trillion dollars but the path couldn't have been more different. Apple being very deliberate, very long term, sometimes decade or more long, planning. Amazon on the other hand, hundreds of experiments, most fail and some succeed spectacularly. I remember an Amazon exec comparing these experiments to Cambrian explosion and I think it beautifully captures Amazon's DNA.
Echo came years after Google Now and Siri and Cortana. Taking years old concepts and putting them into a speaker isn't really that inventive. No one is getting a Nobel prize for the Echo.
Crediting amazon for "public cloud computing" is pretty ridiculous. Managed VPS services were a thing when Amazon was still a book store.
Yes, Amazon's services make things easier and in some instances cheaper. None of it was really inventive, though, and definitely not comparable to the list of Bell inventions.
This can't be a serious argument. Even today there's no cloud provider with the breadth of services that Amazon offers. Amazon didn't just implement cloud technologies like block storage, networking models, and off-board hardware support for virtualization; they created an entirely new programming model on those services.
I've heard the "it's not inventive" arguments like this from companies that tried to compete with Amazon. The one where I worked got creamed.
