realized long before the vast majority of Amazoniansthat Amazon needs to be a platform.You wouldn't really think that an online bookstoreneeds to be an extensible, programmable platform. Would you?Well, the first big thing Bezos realized is thatthe infrastructure they'd built for selling and shipping books and sundry couldbe transformed an excellent repurposable computing platform. So now they havethe Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud, and the Amazon Elastic MapReduce, and theAmazon Relational Database Service, and a whole passel' o' other servicesbrowsable ataws.amazon.com.These services host the backends for some pretty successful companies, redditbeing my personal favorite of the bunch.The other big realization he had was that he can'talways build the right thing. I think Larry Tesler might have struck some kindof chord in Bezos when he said his mom couldn't use the goddamn website. It'snot even super clear whose mom he was talking about, and doesn't really matter,because nobody's mom can usethe goddamn website. In fact I myself find the website disturbingly daunting,and I worked there for over half a decade. I've just learned to kinda defocusmy eyes and concentrate on the million or so pixels near the center of the pageabove the fold.I'm not really sure how Bezos came to thisrealization -- the insight that he can't build one product and have it be rightfor everyone. But it doesn't matter, because he gets it. There's actually aformal name for this phenomenon. It's called Accessibility, and it's the mostimportant thing in the computing world.The. Most. Important. Thing.If you're sorta thinking, "huh? You meanlike, blind and deaf people Accessibility?" then you're not alone, becauseI've come to understand that there are lots and LOTS of people just like you:people for whom this idea does not have the right Accessibility, so it hasn'tbeen able to get through to you yet. It's not your fault for not understanding,any more than it would be your fault for being blind or deaf ormotion-restricted or living with any other disability. When software -- oridea-ware for that matter -- fails to be accessible toanyone for anyreason, it is the fault of the software or of the messaging of the idea. Itis an Accessibility failure.Like anything else big and important in life,Accessibility has an evil twin who, jilted by the unbalanced affectiondisplayed by their parents in their youth, has grown into an equally powerfulArch-Nemesis (yes, there's more than one nemesis to accessibility) namedSecurity. And boy howdy are the two ever at odds.But I'll argue that Accessibility is actually moreimportant than Security because dialing Accessibility to zero means you have noproduct at all, whereas dialing Security to zero can still get you a reasonablysuccessful product such as the Playstation Network.So yeah. In case you hadn't noticed, I couldactually write a book on this topic. A fat one, filled with amusing anecdotesabout ants and rubber mallets at companies I've worked at. But I will never getthis little rant published, and you'll never get it read, unless I start towrap up.That one last thing that Google doesn't do well isPlatforms. We don't understand platforms. We don't "get" platforms.Some of you do, but you are the minority. This