Amazon Web Services (AWS) has never been the open source ogre that some have claimed, but it also hasn’t been quite as good as some have wanted. As AWS has grown larger, my personal view is that it has sometimes struggled to apply its own Leadership Principles or LPs (“Customer Obsession,” “Deliver Results,” “Insist on the Highest Standards,” “Bias for Action,” etc.). It has had difficulty controlling the customer experience while not stepping all over its partners’ toes when partners were often better situated to deliver a superior customer experience. In Amazonian-speak, the company wasn’t “Earning Trust.” Arguably, it failed to care for customers that might prefer “full-fat” partner software but were instead served a native AWS “skim milk” alternative.
