they're all still there, and Larry is not.Micro-managing isn't that third thing that Amazondoes better than us, by the way. I mean, yeah, they micro-manage really well,but I wouldn't list it as a strength or anything. I'm just trying to set thecontext here, to help you understand what happened. We're talking about a guywho in all seriousness has said on many public occasions that people should bepaying him to work at Amazon. He hands out little yellow stickies with his nameon them, reminding people "who runs the company" when they disagreewith him. The guy is a regular... well, Steve Jobs, I guess. Except without thefashion or design sense. Bezos is super smart; don't get me wrong. He justmakes ordinary control freaks look like stoned hippies.So one day Jeff Bezos issued a mandate. He's doingthat all the time, of course, and people scramble like ants being pounded witha rubber mallet whenever it happens. But on one occasion -- back around 2002 Ithink, plus or minus a year -- he issued a mandate that was so out there, sohuge and eye-bulgingly ponderous, that it made all of his other mandates looklike unsolicited peer bonuses.His Big Mandate went something along these lines:1) All teams will henceforth expose their data andfunctionality through service interfaces.2) Teams must communicate with each other throughthese interfaces.3) There will be no other form of interprocesscommunication allowed: no direct linking, no direct reads of another team'sdata store, no shared-memory model, no back-doors whatsoever. The onlycommunication allowed is via service interface calls over the network.4) It doesn't matter what technology they use.HTTP, Corba, Pubsub, custom protocols -- doesn't matter. Bezos doesn't care.5) All service interfaces, without exception, mustbe designed from the ground up to be externalizable. That is to say, the teammust plan and design to be able to expose the interface to developers in theoutside world. No exceptions.6) Anyone who doesn't do this will be fired.7) Thank you; have a nice day!Ha, ha! You 150-odd ex-Amazon folks here will ofcourse realize immediately that #7 wasa little joke I threw in, because Bezos most definitely does not give a shitabout your day.#6, however, was quite real, so people went towork. Bezos assigned a couple of Chief Bulldogs to oversee the effort andensure forward progress, headed up by Uber-Chief Bear Bulldog Rick Dalzell.Rick is an ex-Armgy Ranger, West Point Academy graduate, ex-boxer, ex-ChiefTorturer slash CIO at Wal*Mart, and is a big genial scary man who used the word"hardened interface" a lot. Rick was a walking, talking hardenedinterface himself, so needless to say, everyone made LOTS of forward progressand made sure Rick knew about it.Over the next couple of years, Amazon transformedinternally into a service-oriented architecture. They learned a tremendousamount while effecting this transformation. There was lots of existingdocumentation and lore about SOAs, but at Amazon's vast scale it was about asuseful as telling Indiana Jones to look both ways before crossing the street.Amazon's dev staff made a lot of discoveries along the way. A teeny tinysampling of these discoveries included:- pager escalation gets way harder, because aticket might bounce through 20 service calls before