Amazon does everything wrong, and Google does everything right. Sure,it's a sweeping generalization, but a surprisingly accurate one. It's prettycrazy. There are probably a hundred or even two hundred different ways you cancompare the two companies, and Google is superior in all but three of them, ifI recall correctly. I actually did a spreadsheet at one point but Legalwouldn't let me show it to anyone, even though recruiting loved it.I mean, just to give you a very brief taste:Amazon's recruiting process is fundamentally flawed by having teams hire forthemselves, so their hiring bar is incredibly inconsistent across teams,despite various efforts they've made to level it out. And their operations area mess; they don't really have SREs and they make engineers pretty much doeverything, which leaves almost no time for coding - though again this variesby group, so it's luck of the draw. They don't give a single shit about charityor helping the needy or community contributions or anything like that. Nevercomes up there, except maybe to laugh about it. Their facilities aredirt-smeared cube farms without a dime spent on decor or common meeting areas.Their pay and benefits suck, although much less so lately due to localcompetition from Google and Facebook. But they don't have any of our perks orextras -- they just try to match the offer-letter numbers, and that's the endof it. Their code base is a disaster, with no engineering standards whatsoeverexcept what individual teams choose to put in place.To be fair, they do have a nice versioned-librarysystem that we really ought to emulate, and a nice publish-subscribe systemthat we also have no equivalent for. But for the most part they just have abunch of crappy tools that read and write state machine information intorelational databases. We wouldn't take most of it even if it were free.I think the pubsub system and their library-shelfsystem were two out of the grand total of three things Amazon does better thangoogle.I guess you could make an argument that their biasfor launching early and iterating like mad is also something they do well, butyou can argue it either way. They prioritize launching early over everything else, includingretention and engineering discipline and a bunch of other stuff that turns outto matter in the long run. So even though it's given them some competitiveadvantages in the marketplace, it's created enough other problems to make itsomething less than a slam-dunk.But there's one thing they do really really wellthat pretty much makes up for ALL of their political, philosophical andtechnical screw-ups.Jeff Bezos is an infamous micro-manager. Hemicro-manages every single pixel of Amazon's retail site. He hired LarryTesler, Apple's Chief Scientist and probably the very most famous and respectedhuman-computer interaction expert in the entire world, and then ignored everygoddamn thing Larry said for three years until Larry finally -- wisely -- leftthe company. Larry would do these big usability studies and demonstrate beyondany shred of doubt that nobody can understand that frigging website, but Bezosjust couldn't let go of those pixels, all those millions of semantics-packedpixels on the landing page. They were like millions of his own preciouschildren. So