Transcript: (disclaimer: may contain unintentionally confusing, inaccurate and/or amusing transcription errors)
David: People, turns out, love the amazon.com episode. That was so awesome. It makes me a little nervous for this one.
David：大家果然很喜欢那期讲 amazon.com 的节目，太棒了。这让我对这期节目有点紧张。
Ben: Oh, massively. By far and away, our biggest episode ever. Is this how George Lucas felt when he was doing Empire Strikes Back?
Ben：非常紧张。那绝对是我们迄今为止最火的一期节目。乔治·卢卡斯在拍《帝国反击战》的时候是不是也有这种感觉？
David: You did not just compare us to George Lucas, did you? I swear we're humble.
David：你不会真把我们和乔治·卢卡斯相提并论了吧？我发誓我们很谦虚。
Ben: All right, let's do this.
Ben：好了，我们开始吧。
Welcome to season 11 episode 3 of Acquired, the podcast about great technology companies and the stories and playbooks behind them. I'm Ben Gilbert, and I'm the co-founder and Managing Director of Seattle-based Pioneer Square Labs and our venture fund, PSL Ventures.
欢迎收听《Acquired》第十一季第三集，这是一档讲述伟大科技公司及其背后故事与战略的播客。我是 Ben Gilbert，西雅图 Pioneer Square Labs 的联合创始人和董事总经理，同时也是我们的风投基金 PSL Ventures 的合伙人。
David: I'm David Rosenthal. I'm an angel investor based in San Francisco. Cold San Francisco here in August.
David：我是 David Rosenthal，一名居住在旧金山的天使投资人。八月的旧金山也太冷了。
Ben: And we are your hosts. All right, David. Let's say you run a lemonade stand. You sell me the highest quality lemonade you can for the lowest price, \$1 a cup. When you add up all your costs, the variable ones, like the lemons and the fixed ones, like the table that you rented, it costs about 98½ cents to give me that lemonade. You're happy you returned the profit, I'm sure. But man, you are going to have to sell a lot of lemonade.
Ben：我们就是你们的主播。好了，David，假设你经营一个柠檬水摊。你以最低的价格——一杯 1 美元——卖给我最高品质的柠檬水。当你把所有的成本加起来，不论是像柠檬这样的变动成本，还是像你租的桌子这样的固定成本，你卖一杯柠檬水的成本大概是 98.5 美分。你当然很高兴还能有点利润。但伙计，你得卖出很多很多柠檬水才行。
David: You're telling me I'm amazon.com in the fourth quarter of 2001, which is actually where we're going to start our story?
David：你是在说我就是 2001 年第四季度的 amazon.com？我们今天的故事确实正是从那里开始的，对吧？
Ben: Perhaps, but you discovered something interesting. By making all this lemonade, you get really good at the stuff it takes to run a lemonade business, the perfect cups, ice, and lemons, everything. It turns out, all that stuff that you just got good at, you can sell to other businesses. Guess what? You realize further that when you sell your services to other companies, when you charge them \$1, it only costs you 70¢ to make it. So 30% margins, instead of something like 1.5%. You have to sell a lot less of those services than you ever did on lemonade to make the same amount of money.
Ben：也许吧，但你发现了一件有趣的事。在制作这么多柠檬水的过程中，你对经营柠檬水摊所需的一切都变得很擅长，比如完美的杯子、冰块和柠檬等等。而你擅长的这些东西，其实都可以卖给其他企业。你进一步意识到，当你向其他公司出售这些服务时，收他们 1 美元，你的成本只有 70 美分。也就是说，毛利率是 30%，而不是原来做柠檬水那 1.5%。你只需要卖出比柠檬水少得多的服务，就能赚到同样的钱。
从一个商品化、受拖累的商业模式中脱身，转入更赚钱的服务业，巴菲特认为这样的转型不可思议，可能历史上从未发生过，比如，航空公司出来做信用卡，汽车制造商出来做汽车保险，等等。
David: If you told me that, I would dig into it even further. I would realize that the existing companies that sold stands, cups, and whatnot, were actually making 70% margins on their stands and cups. I would be quite happy to take 30% margins and disrupt them and still do better than my lemonade business.
David：如果你这么告诉我，我会继续深入研究。我会发现那些原本在卖摊位、杯子等东西的公司，其实它们的毛利率是 70%。那我拿着 30% 的毛利率去打破他们的市场，同时比我自己的柠檬水生意还赚钱，我会非常满意的。
Ben: Listeners, of course, on our last episode, we talked about Amazon's retail business. Today, we are talking about Amazon Web Services, the cloud computing pioneer. Those margin percentages that I just used are the real ones for the retail business and for AWS.
Ben：听众朋友们，我们上一期讲的是亚马逊的零售业务。而今天，我们要讲的是 Amazon Web Services——云计算的先锋。刚才我用的那些毛利率数字，正是亚马逊零售业务和 AWS 的真实对比。
AWS's revenue is only about 15% the size of Amazon's massive retail business, but their profits or the operating income, to be specific, from AWS, are in total the same, if not more than their ecommerce store. I think it's the case that every year since 2015, when they started breaking out AWS's financials, the total operating income from AWS has actually been bigger than the retail business.
虽然 AWS 的营收只相当于亚马逊庞大零售业务的约 15%，但从利润，也就是运营利润来看，AWS 和电商业务相当，甚至可能还更高。我记得自从 2015 年亚马逊开始单独披露 AWS 的财务数据以来，AWS 的总运营利润每年实际上都超过了零售业务。
David: There may have been some quarters where it was off. But generally, that trend is accurate.
David：可能有个别季度有所出入，但整体趋势确实如此。
Ben: Wild. We're going to talk about a completely different type of business today than we talked about last time. Sort of. There are a lot of similarities and a lot more than you would guess when looking at an online retailer that started as an online bookstore and a cloud computing pioneer.
Ben：太疯狂了。今天我们要谈的是一种和上次完全不同类型的业务。也不完全是。其实它们之间有很多相似之处，比你光看一个起初是在线书店、现在却是云计算先锋的电商时所能想到的还要多。
Speaking of ecommerce, we have huge news. You can finally, finally buy Acquired merch on the Internet. That is available acquired.fm/store or click the link in the show notes. You can grab your favorite tee, crewneck, hoodie, tank, or even a onesie, since I know a lot of you out there are like David and have little ones at home.
说到电商，我们有个重大消息：你们终于、终于可以在网上买到《Acquired》的周边了！可以去 acquired.fm/store，或者点节目说明里的链接。你可以选购你最爱的 T 恤、圆领衫、连帽衫、背心，甚至婴儿连体衣——因为我知道在座不少人和 David 一样，家里有小宝宝。
After you finish this episode, comment, discuss it with David and I and 13,000 other smart members of the Acquired community at acquired.fm/slack. If you're dying for more required in the meantime, go check out the LP Show by searching Acquired LP in any podcast player.
听完这期节目后，欢迎来 acquired.fm/slack 上和我、David，以及 Acquired 社区的 13,000 位聪明听众一起留言讨论。如果你还想听更多，可以在任何播客应用里搜索 “Acquired LP” 来收听我们的 LP Show。
The next episode is with David's partner in crime at Kindergarten Ventures, Nat Manning, talking about his company Kettle and how the business of reinsurance works. That, of course, is already live if you are a paying LP, which you can become acquired.fm/lp.
下一期节目是 David 和他在 Kindergarten Ventures 的合伙人 Nat Manning 的对谈，聊的是他创办的公司 Kettle，以及再保险业务是如何运作的。当然，如果你是我们的付费 LP，这期节目已经可以收听了。你也可以通过 acquired.fm/lp 成为 LP。
Without further ado, David, take us in. Listeners, as always, the show is not investment advice. David and I may certainly have investments in the companies we discuss. The show is for informational and entertainment purposes only.
废话不多说，David，带我们进入正题吧。各位听众，和往常一样，这档节目并不构成投资建议。我和 David 有可能在节目中讨论的公司中有投资。本节目仅供信息分享与娱乐用途。
David: We left off the amazon.com episode in 2007 with the Sony PlayStation-like coda of the Kindle story. The new chapter, one might say that it seemed at the time to the outside world that Amazon was opening as a true technology company with Kindle. I believe the quote from Eric Schmidt in The Everything Store was, "The book guys finally got technology." Of course, as we talked about, Jeff Bezos always got technology. This was not a shift.
David：我们上次讲到 amazon.com 的故事在 2007 年，以有点像索尼 PlayStation 式的 Kindle 小结结尾。可以说，从外界的视角看，Kindle 代表着亚马逊作为一家真正的科技公司开启了新的篇章。我记得 Eric Schmidt 在《一网打尽》一书中说过一句话：“这些卖书的家伙终于搞懂了科技。”但如我们之前说过的，Jeff Bezos 一直都懂科技，这并不是某种转变。
In particular, this was not anything new because of everything we are going to talk about on this whole separate episode today. To do that, we need to rewind back, as I said above, to the end of 2001, early 2002, the immediate post dot-com bubble popping crash era.
更重要的是，我们今天整期节目要讲的内容说明这其实根本不是什么新事。为此，我们得回到刚才提到的时间点——2001 年底到 2002 年初，也就是互联网泡沫刚破裂的那段时期。
Bezos and Amazon, as hard as it is now to remember, he was like an embattled CEO at this point. It just gotten rid of COO Joe Galli, the board has brought in coach Campbell, Amazon's fighting for its life against both eBay and Wall Street.
Bezos 和亚马逊当时的处境，现在可能很难想象，但他当时确实像个身陷困境的 CEO。刚刚解雇了首席运营官 Joe Galli，董事会请来了“教练” Bill Campbell，亚马逊正同时与 eBay 和华尔街进行生死搏斗。
Ben: Is it insane to think that the board was in the place with Jeff Bezos thinking, we really need some adult supervision to be a scale CEO and help this guy out? Freaking Jeff Bezos. Obviously, that did not pan out. Bezos came valiantly riding back in and ran the business for another 20 years.
Ben：你不觉得太疯狂了吗？董事会当时居然认为 Jeff Bezos 需要“成年人的监督”，需要找个成熟的 CEO 来辅佐他？天呐，是 Jeff Bezos 啊！显然那套没奏效。Bezos 后来自己英勇归位，又亲自掌舵了二十年。
David: Another 20 years until handing the reins to somebody else who we're going to spend a lot of time in just a little bit here talking about, of course, current Amazon CEO, Andy Jassy.
David：又过了二十年，才把权杖交给了另一个人——我们接下来也会花不少时间来讲的现任亚马逊 CEO，Andy Jassy。
I don't even know what the right word is to use to describe AWS. I wrote behemoth in my notes.
我甚至不知道该用什么词来形容 AWS。我在笔记里写的是“巨兽”。
Ben: Pioneer, inventor.
Ben：先锋，发明者。
David: I don't think there's anything you can say that captures how big and how important AWS is. It is one of the biggest and most important businesses, technologies, products of the modern world.
David：我觉得没有任何一个词能够真正形容 AWS 的规模和重要性。它是当今世界最大、最重要的业务、技术、产品之一。
Ben: No doubt.
Ben：毫无疑问。
David: I don't think it's controversial to say even much more so than amazon.com.
David：我觉得说AWS比amazon.com更重要，这个观点并不具有争议性。
Ben: It's interesting. During the pandemic, you could argue that amazon.com was more important, because everybody needed to buy goods and get them at home.
Ben：很有意思的是，在疫情期间你可以说amazon.com更重要，因为每个人都需要在家里购买和接收商品。
David: But everybody also needed to be on the Internet, and the Internet runs on AWS. Today, we're going to tell that story. It's funny. As we did the research, there's no Everything Store book dedicated to AWS. There are a lot of very disparate resources and stories out there. There actually are quite a few conflicting and competing stories about what the true origin is of AWS. You might say it has a cloudy origin. See what we did there?
David：但大家同样需要上网，而整个互联网是运行在AWS上的。今天我们就要讲述这个故事。有趣的是，在我们做研究的过程中，发现并没有一本像《The Everything Store》那样专门讲述AWS的书。外面有很多零散的资料和故事，实际上关于AWS的起源有很多互相矛盾且竞争的说法。你可以说它的起源是“cloudy（模糊/云端）”的——你看我们这是双关。
Ben: It is true. As we were doing the research note, of course, David and I read both of Brad Stone's excellent books, I watched the PBS Frontline documentary, which of course, is a very specific angle that they're trying to take on the company. When you read any of these Amazon analysis pieces, they're like 95% about the retail business. They'll talk about things like the relationship with employees and the big New York Times piece that came out in 2015.
Ben：这是真的。在我们做研究笔记的时候，David 和我都读了 Brad Stone 的两本杰作，我还看了PBS的《前线》纪录片，那当然是从他们特定的角度讲述这家公司。当你阅读任何关于亚马逊的分析文章时，有95%都是在讲零售业务。他们会谈到员工关系，还有2015年《纽约时报》那篇著名的大文章。
They'll talk about the relationship with the warehouse workers, or was this good for the world? Everyone indexes on that which is important and deserves all the attention it's got, but almost none of these spend a material amount of time on AWS other than mostly an apocryphal founding story, which is not even really how it happened.
他们会讲与仓库工人的关系，或是亚马逊是否对世界有益？大家都在聚焦这些问题，这些确实重要，也值得关注，但几乎没有人花大量篇幅讨论AWS，除了那种流传甚广但其实并不真实的创始故事。
David: We identified you're referring to one origin story of AWS. We identified not one, not two, not three, but four separate origin stories. We're going to tell them all here. I think there is something important to learn about what AWS is, about Amazon, and about Amazon culture in all of these.
David：我们意识到你提到的是AWS的其中一个起源故事。我们找到了不止一个，不止两个，不止三个，而是四个独立的起源版本。我们今天会全部讲出来。我认为通过这些故事，我们可以了解到AWS是什么、亚马逊是什么，以及亚马逊的文化。
Let's start with the first and most obviously, untrue one, which is ironically also the one that the layperson believes the most.
我们先从第一个、也是最明显不真实的故事开始讲起，讽刺的是，这是大多数外行人最相信的版本。
Ben: Yes, because it's tempting. It's like an, oh. It's too convenient.
Ben：对，因为这个故事太有吸引力了。就像是“哦，原来如此”，太顺理成章了。
David: Yes. That story is the excess capacity narrative. The way this story goes is that right around this time, 2001, 2002, 2003, amazon.com (the retail business), like all retail businesses in America (at least) is highly seasonal. They have huge spikes of traffic and demand in Q4 for the holiday shopping season. That's when the largest share of any quarter revenue happens in Q4.
David：没错。这个故事被称为“过剩产能论”。故事是这样说的：大约在2001年到2003年期间，amazon.com（即零售业务）和美国所有的零售业务一样，具有很强的季节性。在第四季度的假日购物季，他们的流量和需求会激增。Q4是他们全年收入占比最高的一个季度。
Ben: So much so that for the first (at least) five years of the business, there was a rule in November and December that you could not commit new code to production.
Ben：甚至严重到，在公司前五年（至少），在11月和12月有一条规定：禁止向生产环境提交任何新代码。
David: That's right.
David：没错。
Ben: It was so all hands on deck that no new features were allowed unless it was a red flag bug fix.
Ben：当时公司全员都投入运营，以至于除非是严重bug修复，否则不允许上线任何新功能。
David: We didn't talk about this in the amazon.com episode, but for years, and years, and years, the executive team, the business side of the company, and the engineers, everybody would go work in the warehouses in Q4.
David：我们在amazon.com那一集里没讲过这个，但多年里，公司高管、业务部门、工程师——几乎所有人在第四季度都会去仓库帮忙工作。
Ben: That or customer service. Oh, how times have changed. Can you imagine someone sitting down in day one north or Doppler being told that they have to go pick and pack for a while?
Ben：或者去客服部门。时代真的变了。你能想象现在有人刚入职在Day One North或Doppler大楼里被告知要去拣货打包一阵子吗？
David: I think for a while, they continued to do it even when it wasn't necessary just like a culture thing. Obviously, those days are gone now. The urban legend is that because of this dynamic, Amazon had this brilliant realization around, again, when they were trying to achieve profitability, that they had excess technical infrastructure capacity in their IT operations during quarters one through three.
David：我记得有一段时间，即便没必要，公司也继续这么做，作为一种文化传统。当然，这些日子早就过去了。都市传说是，正是因为这种运作方式，亚马逊在努力实现盈利的过程中突然意识到，在第一到第三季度，他们的IT技术基础设施存在过剩产能。
They had to build out for the peak demand of Q4, all the traffic on the website, all the transactions happening, but the rest of the year, all that capacity was just sitting there. They decided, let's rent out that capacity to other developers. Brilliant, brilliant. We're going to turn a large expense line in the business into a revenue line.
为了应对第四季度的流量高峰、网站访问和交易高峰，他们必须扩建基础设施，但在一年其他时间里，这些产能都处于闲置状态。于是他们决定把这些产能出租给其他开发者。太聪明了，把公司的一项巨大开支转变成了收入来源。
Ben: Magic. Of course, this falls down into enormous places. One is, if you've ever been inside a pre-cloud technology company, you know that...
Ben：听起来像魔法。当然，问题非常大。如果你曾经在一个“云计算之前”的技术公司工作过，你就知道……
David: It doesn't work that way.
David：事情不是那样运作的。
Ben: Yeah, you can't just say like, oh, cool, the servers aren't in use right now, there's nothing highly customized about these servers, and they're not tightly coupled to our applications in any way. We'll just make it so that anyone can very easily just run their applications on it. There's enough security setup correctly so that anyone can just get access to our data center.
Ben：是啊，你不能简单地说：“太好了，这些服务器现在没在用，它们没有特别定制化，也没有和我们的应用紧密耦合。我们可以让任何人轻松地运行他们自己的应用。”你也不能假设数据中心的安全设置已经完善到让外部公司可以直接接入。
The network hardware understands how to serve other tenants other than us. None of that existed and none of that was true. There's just no way you can be like, oh, yeah, other companies just started using our infrastructure, and it was pretty rip and replace.
网络硬件能自动理解如何为其他用户服务？这些条件当时根本都不存在，完全不符合现实。根本不可能做到让其他公司直接使用你的基础设施，好像只需要简单更换一下就能搞定。
David: In the pre-cloud infrastructure world, you installed your software, your codebase, on your servers that you owned. The amazon.com codebase was literally installed on a bunch of boxes that they owned. You couldn't just rent out the capacity.
David：在云计算出现之前的世界里，软件和代码都是部署在你自己拥有的服务器上的。amazon.com的代码库是直接装在他们自己的一堆服务器上的。你不可能把这些产能简单地出租出去。
Ben: Until 2000, they were servers from Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC). They were DEC Alpha servers. These were unbelievably high margin servers that, I believe, leased from the manufacturer. It was the same business model that IBM had forever and Oracle has or had forever, where you get this highly bundled hardware and software platform that you would use to run your applications.
Ben：在2000年之前，他们用的是Digital Equipment Corporation（DEC）生产的Alpha服务器。这些服务器利润率极高，而且我记得他们是从制造商那里租来的。这是IBM和Oracle长期以来的商业模式，把高度集成的硬件和软件平台捆绑销售，供客户运行应用程序。
They would make 80% gross margins on these things. There's a massive markup. They were monolithic. To be honest, the thing that really changed all this was Linux. When Linux came out and you could do the stuff that you used to need Unix workstations for on an open-source operating system, then everything changed, because you can go buy a whole bunch of different hardware, put Linux on it, and then write your own applications.
这些设备的毛利率高达80%，利润惊人，而且是高度封闭的一体化系统。说实话，真正改变这一切的是Linux。Linux出来之后，你可以用这个开源操作系统来完成以前需要Unix工作站才能做的事，一切都变了。因为你可以自己买各种硬件，装上Linux，然后写自己的应用。
This laid the groundwork for maybe infrastructure doesn't have to be as insanely expensive. All the profit pools from all of this infrastructure don't have to be captured by (say) a DEC, an oracle, or an IBM. This would lay the groundwork for a lot of things to come, including, frankly, just saving Amazon as a company.
这为“基础设施也许不需要那么昂贵”这一理念奠定了基础。所有这些基础设施上的利润池，不必再被DEC、Oracle或IBM这类公司垄断。这些变化为后来的很多事情铺平了道路，坦白说，也正是这点在某种程度上挽救了亚马逊。
In 2000, they almost went out of business because they were so tight on cash. They were spending so much on infrastructure that this moved to the open-source ecosystem and doing a massive rewrite of all of amazon.com to run on Linux and—they did this big deal with HP—run on HP servers.
2000年，亚马逊几乎破产，因为现金非常紧张。他们在基础设施上花的钱太多了，所以后来他们转向开源生态系统，重写了整个amazon.com的网站，让它能在Linux上运行，而且他们还与HP达成了一项重大合作协议，把系统迁移到HP的服务器上。
David: Right, rather than DEC.
David：对，是用HP服务器取代了DEC的。
Ben: That, frankly, saved the company from a cost perspective during that really tight time.
Ben：坦白说，从成本角度看，这在公司财政极度紧张的时候救了亚马逊一命。
David: But that is not virtualized cloud servers. It's not what we're talking about with AWS. Here's the other reason why this excess capacity myth is a myth.
David：但这还不是虚拟化的云服务器，这跟我们现在谈的AWS不是一回事。再说一个理由，说明这个“过剩产能论”为什么是个神话。
Ben: How is Amazon supposed to serve their AWS customers if all of them are in excess capacity during Q4 at all? Let's say I'm Netflix, and I just took a dependency, and all of my streaming is happening on AWS. Is Amazon just going to tell me I can't do it during Q4 when they need the servers? It's ridiculous.
Ben：如果AWS的所有客户都依赖这些“剩余产能”，那到了Q4亚马逊自己需要服务器时，怎么可能还服务这些客户？假设我是Netflix，我的流媒体服务都依赖AWS，亚马逊会在Q4告诉我“我们自己要用服务器，你不能用了”？太荒唐了。
David: No holiday movies. Can't watch *Die Hard* at Christmas.
David：节日电影都别想看了，圣诞节也别看《虎胆龙威》了。
Ben: Is a very convenient narrative when someone's trying to solve the puzzle of, how did this internet retailer turned into a real technology company? Oh, they had all these extra servers dispelled.
Ben：这个说法听起来很方便，仿佛是给“这家互联网零售商怎么变成了一家真正的科技公司？”这个问题找到了简单答案——“哦，他们有多余的服务器。”这太简化问题了。
David: The best and final word on this that we have to put here, because it literally is from part of the horse's mouth itself, it comes from Werner Vogels' at the time AWS CTO now CTO of all of Amazon, who wrote flat out in a Quora post in 2011, "The excess capacity story is a myth. It was never a matter of selling excess capacity. Actually, within two months after launch, AWS would have already burned through the excess amazon.com capacity. Amazon Web Services was always considered a business by itself with the expectation that it could even grow as big as the amazon.com retail operation." Maybe.
David：我们必须把这段作为对“过剩产能说”的终结之言，因为它来自“马嘴里”直接说出来的人——当时的AWS首席技术官、现在整个亚马逊的CTO Werner Vogels。他在2011年的Quora贴文中明确写道：“过剩产能的说法是个神话。AWS从来就不是在销售过剩产能。事实上，AWS上线后不到两个月，就已经消耗掉了amazon.com的多余产能。AWS从一开始就被视为一个独立业务，其预期规模甚至可以和亚马逊零售业务一样大。”也许真的可以。
Ben: The other interesting thing to point out is he doesn't give Amazon enough credit about their intentionality and strategy.
Ben：还有一个有趣的点是，这种说法也没有给亚马逊应有的战略意图和前瞻性以足够认可。
David: It short sells Amazon.
David：它是在低估亚马逊。
Ben: Yeah, they had this extra capacity, this cost center that they were using. Two things. One, technology was never a cost center for Amazon. They never looked at it like, oh, we have an IT department. They always thought about themselves as a technology company. It was always thinking about, okay, in 18 months Moore's Law is going to make it so we have twice as much compute. What crazy cool stuff can we do with that? They always looked at technology as an investment, not a cost center.
Ben：对，有人说他们是把这个多余产能从成本中心转为盈利中心。但有两个点。第一，在亚马逊，技术从来都不是成本中心。他们从不把技术看作“IT部门”的支出，而是把自己看作一家科技公司。他们总在思考：18个月后摩尔定律会带来两倍的计算能力，我们能用它实现什么疯狂又酷的东西？他们始终把技术当成投资，而不是开销。
The other thing, to your point that it sells them short on is as if this wasn't an intentional strategy. This was an incredibly intentional strategy in a brand new business school case study type, laser focused on an emerging market, that they had reason to believe that they could create.
第二点，正如你说的，这种说法让人觉得这不是个有意识的战略决策。但实际上，这正是一个非常有意图的战略，一种可以写入商学院案例的经典战略。他们把注意力聚焦在一个新兴市场上，并且有理由相信这个市场是他们可以创造出来的。
David: That's origin story number one. Origin story number two, we're going to get into this a lot more. I didn't even really realize before diving into this, the depth of innovation of what AWS was, what Amazon was doing, and led them to it, is so beyond anything else that was happening at the time.
David：这就是第一个起源故事。接下来是第二个起源故事，我们会详细讲述。在深入研究之前，我自己都没意识到AWS所代表的创新程度，亚马逊为此所做的事情，以及他们走到这一步的深度远远超出了当时的时代背景。
This is a true fundamental innovation, so let's get into it. Remember from the Kindle-Acoda vignette, how it was one of those crazy stories about, who was responsible for the inspiration for the Kindle? It turned out it was Tesla founder, Martin Eberhard.
这是真正意义上的基础性创新。我们开始讲吧。你还记得Kindle和Acoda的故事片段吗？那也是一个离奇的故事，关于Kindle的灵感来自谁？结果竟然是特斯拉的创始人Martin Eberhard。
Ben: It's crazy. He had invented the first ereader that wasn't quite viable yet, and tried to sell it to Amazon, and tried to get investment from Amazon. Amazon said, no, we'll wait till the world shifts a little bit, different technology. It's actually something we can own outright rather than funding and potentially having competitors use, too. Of course, that would be a few years later, and Amazon would create the Kindle internally.
Ben：这太疯狂了。他发明了第一款电子书阅读器，虽然当时还不够成熟，并试图将其卖给亚马逊、寻求投资。但亚马逊拒绝了，说他们会等到技术进一步发展，世界发生一些变化后再行动。这样他们就可以完全拥有这项技术，而不是资助它，结果可能还让竞争对手也用上。几年后，亚马逊内部就自行开发了Kindle。
David: There is a similar figure involved in inspiring the vision for AWS, and that is Tim O'Reilly. For anybody of a certain age, you certainly remember the O'Reilly programming books, the O'Reilly conferences, and in particular, for me, they were the organization and Tim as the leader of the organization, championed the whole idea of Web 2.0.
David：AWS的愿景背后也有类似的一位关键人物，那就是Tim O'Reilly。对很多人来说，O'Reilly出版的编程书、他们举办的技术会议一定记忆犹新。特别是对我来说，Tim和他所领导的团队是Web 2.0理念的主要推动者。
Ben: For sure. I remember first reading (I think) the PHP book that they put out. When Web 2.0, this idea of, I can consume on the web but also I can post on the web, and that led to social media, and one of the key enabling technologies in all that is Ajax. I remember reading the O'Reilly Ajax book of, wow, I can use Asynchronous JavaScript and XML to make dynamic web pages without needing to refresh. That was truly magical at the time.
Ben：完全同意。我记得我读的第一本是他们出的PHP书。当时Web 2.0的概念是：我不仅可以在网上消费内容，还可以发布内容。这促成了社交媒体的兴起。而支撑这一切的核心技术之一就是Ajax。我记得读到O'Reilly的Ajax书时，我震惊了：原来可以用异步JavaScript和XML构建无需刷新就能动态更新的网页！在当时，这简直是魔法。
David: There were a few core tenets that they defined as what Web 2.0 meant. Part of it was in opposition to Web 1.0, which they considered static. Web 2.0 was dynamic like you're saying, but that wasn't all of it.
David：他们对Web 2.0的定义有几个核心原则。一部分是反对Web 1.0的静态特性。Web 2.0像你说的那样是动态的，但这还不是全部。
Another huge part of what they meant by Web 2.0 was what they called participatory culture and interoperability. They meant that both users on websites could interact with the website. If you got Flickr, you would upload your photos. You would interact and change the website. Or Google Maps, of course, it was such a canonical Web 2.0 project. But even more than users interoperating and interacting with Web 2.0 sites, was other developers. Remember mashups, Ben?
Web 2.0的另一个重要核心是“参与式文化”和“互操作性”。意思是用户不再只是浏览网站内容，而是可以与网站互动，比如用Flickr上传照片，参与内容的创建与更新。而Google Maps就是Web 2.0的经典项目之一。但比起用户与网站互动，更关键的是开发者之间的互操作性。你还记得“mashups”（混搭）吗，Ben？
Ben: Like mashing up APIs?
Ben：你是说把各种API组合在一起？
David: Yes. Web 2.0 mashups were such all the rage. Google Maps was like a core part of this. People would take the Google Maps' API and build all sorts of other websites using Google Maps data and content underneath it, or Flickr had an API. It was APIs, it was interoperability, it was anybody can access. It's democratizing what we've built.
David：对，当时Web 2.0的“mashup”非常流行。Google Maps就是其中的核心之一。人们会调用Google Maps的API，构建各种基于地图的新网站，Flickr也有自己的API。这一切围绕的都是API、互操作性，让任何人都能访问，真正实现了技术的民主化。
Ben: Totally. It's so funny to hear all the crypto people today talk about composability. I feel like the old man yelling from a tree or get off my lawn person, but it is very clear that people did not experience the 2006–2010 era of the exact same promise. Instead of smart contracts or composability on blockchains, people were saying it's a RESTful API, it has CRUD operations to create, read, update, or delete things on a service.
Ben：完全赞同。现在听到加密圈的人在谈“可组合性”，真的很有趣。我感觉自己像是站在树下吼叫的老头——“离我草坪远点！”——因为现在的人显然没有经历过2006–2010年间那段充满希望的时代。当时人们不是说什么智能合约或区块链可组合性，而是讲RESTful API，用CRUD操作（创建、读取、更新、删除）来调用服务。
If you're authenticated, then you don't need to necessarily use a web UI. You can just use the API, you can upload a photo programmatically, or you can fetch your entire list of tweets programmatically. All the web, instead of being in these siloed applications was magically free for data to move about in a utopian way without anybody's capitalist intentions getting in the way and siloing the data all to themselves.
如果你已验证身份，你甚至不需要使用网页界面，就可以用API上传照片，或获取整条推文列表。整个网络从原本的“数据孤岛”状态，变得可以自由流动，仿佛进入一个没有资本壁垒、数据可以无阻共享的乌托邦时代。
David: In the early days of all this—I think it was early 2002—Tim O'Reilly flies up to Seattle and meets with Jeff Bezos. The reason he wants to come see Jeff, they've had a checkered history in the past. O'Reilly has not always been the biggest fan of Amazon. He's a book publisher, obviously, so he has some feelings. He wants to make the pitch to Jeff that Amazon should embrace Web 2.0 and transform amazon.com into a participatory website.
David：在这一切的早期——我记得是2002年初——Tim O'Reilly飞到西雅图和Jeff Bezos见面。他之所以要见Jeff，是因为他们之前的关系有点复杂。O'Reilly并不总是亚马逊的铁杆粉丝，毕竟他是个图书出版人，对亚马逊有些情绪。他此行的目的是向Jeff推销一个理念：亚马逊应该拥抱Web 2.0，把amazon.com转变成一个“参与式网站”。
Ben: This is a great idea. Being a Web 2.0 company means that you can do business with other companies without needing a BD agreement in place. You don't actually need a partnership agreement. You basically can just publish your API. You can say, pay as you go, here's how you pay, and here's how you get an account. We can shut down your account if we need, but you can get API access to do business with us programmatically through this application programming interface.
Ben：这是个很棒的想法。成为Web 2.0公司意味着你可以不需要业务发展（BD）协议就与其他公司做生意。你甚至不需要签署合作协议，你只需要发布你的API，说明按量付费、如何注册账户。我们可以在必要时关掉你的账户，但你可以通过这个应用程序接口（API）以程序化方式与我们开展业务。
It's great. Maybe no one or two companies will ever even need to talk to each other, which means you can do business with thousands of companies out there, not just a few that your BD people cherry pick.
这太棒了。也许根本不需要公司之间互相沟通，你就可以与成千上万家公司做生意，而不仅仅是让BD人员挑几个合作对象。
David: Yes. Jeff totally gets it. He gets this in so many ways. Amazon.com has this obvious business use case for APIs and allowing other developers and other websites to access data and content from amazon.com, which is they have a giant affiliate program that's called the Amazon Associates Program.
David：没错。Jeff完全明白这一点，而且他从多个角度都理解这个概念。Amazon.com对API有一个非常明显的商业用例，那就是它拥有一个庞大的联盟营销计划，叫做Amazon Associates Program。
Ben: And they've got a catalog of every uniquely identifiable product in the world, certainly in the media space, but at this time, growing into many other categories, too. Wouldn't it be nice to access that authoritative catalog to fetch an image and display that image on my website if I'm trying to tell people, hey, go buy this CD?
Ben：他们拥有全世界每一个有唯一识别码的商品目录，尤其是在媒体领域，而且当时还在扩展到许多其他品类。如果我是一个网站开发者，想推荐某张CD，那我能从这个权威目录中提取图片并显示在我的网站上，不是很棒吗？
David: Display the CD right there and then share the revenue with Amazon.
David：直接在页面展示这张CD，然后和亚马逊分成收入。
Ben: It's good for both of us if I can do that.
Ben：我能这么做，对我和亚马逊来说都是好事。
David: After this meeting, Jeff does two things. One, he completely embraces this idea of Tim O'Reilly. He invites him up regularly to Seattle, has him speak at all hands within the company, evangelize this idea of Web 2.0 and APIs within Amazon.
David：这次会面之后，Jeff做了两件事。第一，他完全接受了Tim O'Reilly的理念。他开始定期邀请Tim来西雅图，让他在公司全员会议上演讲，在公司内部大力宣扬Web 2.0和API的理念。
Two, he starts a new team within Amazon to do just what Tim is suggesting. They build API's that let any website developer plug into the amazon.com product catalog, do everything you just said, Ben, and the stated goal and mission of this team is to make amazon.com API's available to developers and "let them surprise us with what they build."
第二，Jeff在亚马逊内部成立了一个新团队，专门去实现Tim所建议的事。他们构建API，让任何网站开发者都能接入amazon.com的商品目录，正如你刚才说的那样，Ben。这个团队的官方目标是：把amazon.com的API开放给开发者，“让他们用自己的作品来惊艳我们”。
That same year—this is Amazon; they move fast—they hold a conference for developers. In 2002 a total of eight people attend the conference. They announced to the world the launch of this new division within Amazon that is called Amazon Web Services.
就在同一年——这是亚马逊，他们行动很快——他们召开了一个面向开发者的大会。2002年，只有8个人出席了这个会议。他们向全世界宣布：亚马逊内部新成立了一个部门，名字叫Amazon Web Services。
Ben: To your point here, this is not an important thing in the world yet. Amazon having a developer conference with eight people there, and you look at re\:Invent now, I think it has 100,000 people who watch the keynote. A very different world.
Ben：就像你说的，这在当时还不是一件世界级的重要事情。亚马逊举办的开发者大会只有8个人出席。而现在的re\:Invent大会，我记得有十万人观看主旨演讲。完全是两个不同的世界。
David: Yes, a very different world and a very different product. This is called Amazon Web Services, but it is the hot cloud-based IT infrastructure. It's other developers using the amazon.com product catalog. Indeed, Amazon Web Services lives within the Amazon Associates Program.
David：没错，不只是世界不同，产品本身也截然不同。虽然叫做Amazon Web Services，但它当时并不是现在这种热门的基于云的IT基础设施，而是给开发者用来访问amazon.com产品目录的工具。事实上，AWS当时是属于Amazon Associates Program的一部分。
That is run by a guy named Collin Brier, which is very, very fun, because Collin goes on to do many things, including recently co-authoring the book, *Working Backwards*, which is a great book we used for a source in both this episode and the previous episode on amazon.com. In 2002, Collin technically becomes the first head of AWS.
这个项目由Collin Brier负责，这就很有趣了，因为他后来做了很多事，包括最近参与合著了《Working Backwards》这本书，我们在这一期和上一期关于amazon.com的节目中都引用了这本书。2002年，Collin从技术上讲就是AWS的第一任负责人。
Ben: Wow, and it was just within Amazon Associates at this point, because the whole point in this origin story, the scope of the ambition of AWS, was to make available assets of amazon.com to our affiliates, to Amazon Associates, who want to basically fetch images and items from the catalog and have that information passed along when someone purchases something to share some revenue. That was the scope of the ambition based on where it lived in the organization.
Ben：哇，那时候AWS只是Amazon Associates项目的一个部分，因为在这个起源故事里，AWS的野心范围其实很小，它的目的只是向亚马逊的联盟成员开放amazon.com的资源，让他们可以抓取商品目录中的图片和信息，在用户购买商品后实现分成。从它在组织结构中的位置来看，这就是当时的全部目标。
David: All of that is absolutely true. There is no element of myth or falsehood to anything in the second origin story here. Now we'll transition from number two to number three together, but what I think is so important about number two, even though it leads to AWS, that is the creation of AWS but not the AWS we know and love, it's this idea of Web 2.0 and APIs that really starts to take hold, at least in Jeff Bezos' mind.
David：这一切都是真实的，第二个起源故事里没有虚构成分。但我觉得这一段最重要的是——虽然它确实导致了AWS的创建，但这并不是我们今天所熟知和喜爱的AWS。真正有意义的是Web 2.0和API的理念在Jeff Bezos心中开始扎根。
Ben: And we have not once, in this story, said the phrase cloud computing or the cloud. We've said web services. I think people today have heard AWS so many times that they forget that it's a little bit of a misnomer. It's still called Amazon Web Services, but the vast majority of what is happening when customers are paying the ludicrous amount of revenue to Amazon to access AWS is not web services. It is not these RESTful API endpoints that you use to fetch and post information.
Ben：而且在这个故事里，我们一次都没有提到“云计算”或“the cloud”这个词。我们说的是“web services”。今天的人听AWS听得太多了，都忘了这个名字其实不太准确。它虽然叫“Amazon Web Services”，但现在客户花大价钱使用的服务，绝大多数都不是“网络服务”，不是那种用RESTful API来提取或发布信息的东西。
David: Fun sidebar. Do you know the origin of the term ‘cloud’ as applied to IT infrastructure?
David：顺便插一句有趣的事：你知道“cloud（云）”这个词在IT基础设施中是怎么来的？
Ben: Oh, I do not.
Ben：哦，我还真不知道。
David: This is so cool. It started at General Magic.
David：这个太酷了。它起源于General Magic公司。
Ben: Really?
Ben：真的吗？
David: Yeah. How crazy is that? The Apple spin out that invented the iPhone, 20 years before the iPhone. As part of what they were doing, they also wanted to have—the Internet barely existed, so I don't think they thought of it as the Internet—a distributed, always accessible back end, IT infrastructure for all the services that were going to be on the mobile device. They started calling what they built for that, a cloud infrastructure, that the devices could access.
David：对啊，太疯狂了吧？General Magic是从苹果分拆出来的公司，在iPhone诞生前20年就发明了iPhone的雏形。他们当时做的一部分事情是——那时候互联网几乎还不存在，所以他们甚至没把它当作“互联网”——构建一个分布式的、始终可访问的后端IT基础设施，来支持未来的移动设备上的所有服务。他们给那个系统起名叫“cloud infrastructure（云基础设施）”，移动设备可以随时访问它。
Ben: General Magic was a pioneer in so many ways. It's amazing.
Ben：General Magic在太多方面都是先锋，真的令人惊叹。
David: It's such a pioneer. Okay, back now to Amazon. They've launched Amazon Web Services, Web 2.0, blah-blah-blah. That's cool, but that's not what anybody is really focused on at Amazon. They're focused on a lot of problems within the company.
David：确实是个先锋企业。好，回到亚马逊。他们已经推出了Amazon Web Services，Web 2.0什么的，听起来挺酷，但这并不是当时亚马逊内部真正关注的重点。公司里还有很多问题急需解决。
Arguably, the biggest problem is that the codebase of amazon.com that Shel Kaphan designed back in 1995, has been amazing. He made so many great technical decisions that we talked about on the amazon.com episode.
可以说最大的问题是，amazon.com的代码基础架构仍然是Shel Kaphan在1995年设计的。虽然我们在上一期节目里说过，他做了很多非常出色的技术决策。
He designed it for how websites were built in 1995, which was small teams, not at scale, and monolith software codebases, everything we talked about in the beginning of the episode. All of amazon.com, at this point, when it's now a multi billion dollar company, is running on one monolithic software codebase.
但他当初的设计是基于1995年网站构建的方式：小团队、非规模化、单体式的软件结构，也就是我们在这一集开头提到的一切。如今亚马逊已经是一个市值数十亿美元的公司，却仍然运行在一个单一的、庞大的代码库上。
Ben: I do know, after talking to some folks who are early Amazon engineers, around the summertime, they would start looking at, what is the server that would be available on the market going into Q4 that is the baddest ass thing we could possibly buy? They would just buy the most expensive, souped up server they possibly could from DEC or whoever else, and they would just try to make it through Christmas.
Ben：我和一些早期的亚马逊工程师聊过，他们说每年夏天，他们就开始研究市场上有没有最强悍的服务器能在第四季度用上。他们会从DEC或其他厂商那里买来最贵、性能最猛的服务器，只为了撑过圣诞购物季。
David: Yes. Amazon would do code freezes going into the holidays. Think about this. This is just so far until everything we think about with technology companies now and how things run. It's all thanks to AWS.
David：没错。亚马逊在假期前会“冻结代码”。想想这点，就知道它有多落后于我们今天对科技公司的认知和运作方式了。而这一切的改变，后来都要归功于AWS。
You had to do a code freeze heading into the holidays, because as you were adding new features, new elements, and new teams, remember, Amazon at this point, they've got A9, they're working on search, Lab26 is just starting up and getting going, they've got all of these teams, huge numbers of engineers and product managers that are building features, adding features needing to access various parts of the site. Anytime you add one of those to the monolith software codebase, it could break everything, so you had to do a code freeze.
之所以要冻结代码，是因为他们一直在增加新功能、新模块、新团队。你要知道那时候，亚马逊已经有A9在做搜索，还有刚刚起步的Lab26，还有无数的工程师和产品经理在构建功能、修改网站的各个部分。而只要你往那个单体代码库里加入新内容，就有可能导致整个系统崩溃，所以必须冻结代码。
Remember, Amazon as a company now, is trying to focus on profitability and efficiency. It gets to the point where the company just literally grinds to a halt. There is a lot of good stuff in the *Working Backwards* book about how hard it became to get anything done and built at Amazon because of this rat's nest of complexities involved on the technical and infrastructure side.
别忘了，亚马逊当时正在努力追求盈利和效率。但公司最后却陷入了技术和基础设施复杂性带来的“老鼠窝式”困局，几乎陷入停滞状态。*Working Backwards*这本书中有很多精彩描述，说的是亚马逊在那种技术瓶颈下，想做成任何一件事都有多难。
Ben: As we're articulating problems here that are happening, one of them is of course, you're going to tip the server over if you add any additional complexity. The other of which is Amazon is doing the Amazon thing and they're trying to enter new businesses and new categories. They're trying to grow.
Ben：我们现在描述的问题之一，当然是只要增加一点复杂度，服务器就会撑不住。而另一个问题是，亚马逊还在做它最擅长的事：进入新业务、新品类，努力扩张。
They're trying to grow because the way that they've designed the business, as we mentioned in the last episode, the cashflow\.com idea, where they're spending supplier money to grow before they're paying suppliers. Basically, they're investing the float in growth. They do have to keep growing because they have bills coming due. They're continuing to look for new categories to expand into. They're looking around. They're seeing competition everywhere. They're just trying to get big fast.
他们要不断增长，是因为他们的商业模型——我们在上一集说过，是“cashflow\.com”的方式——是先花供应商的钱扩张，再慢慢支付货款。基本上，他们是靠“浮存金”来投资增长。他们必须持续扩张，因为账单马上就要到了。他们不停地寻找可以扩展的新品类，环顾四周，到处都是竞争。他们只有一个目标：快速做大。
You have the issue of, well, we don't want to get more code and tip the server over, which of course, means you can't launch these new businesses, you can't continue to grow, and you can't bring on more customers because more customers is more traffic, which is also going to tip the server over.
但问题是，你不能再往代码库里加新东西了，不然服务器就要崩。这意味着你无法推出新业务、无法继续扩张、也无法吸引更多客户，因为更多客户就意味着更多流量，服务器也同样撑不住。
David: Let's just take one incredibly illustrative example—the marketplace business. When Amazon figured that out, that was transformative. That was high margin revenue. That was how they competed with eBay. Technically, to do that, they had to re-architect to help the buy button work on the website. Imagine, with a monolithic software codebase, what was involved in that?
David：我们就拿一个非常典型的例子来说——Marketplace业务。亚马逊意识到这个机会之后，彻底改变了局面。这是高利润的收入来源，也是他们对抗eBay的方式。但从技术角度看，要实现这个功能，他们得重构整个网站的架构，仅仅是让“购买”按钮正常工作，在一个单体代码库下，就已经非常复杂了。
Ben: You just get so slow in your actual software development, therefore slow to ship, and therefore slow to innovate, because you're afraid of, uh-oh, what did this other team commit to the codebase here? What does that assume? Can I trust the contract that this function had is still true, or did someone update this function in a way that was tightly coupled to the requirement that they had for their thing?
Ben：你的软件开发速度会变得极其缓慢，交付速度慢，创新速度也慢。因为你会担心：“哎呀，别的团队提交的这段代码是怎么回事？它依赖了什么前提？”你无法确认某个函数的约定是否还有效，或者它是不是已经被别的团队基于自身需求修改了，而且变得紧耦合了。
Before you know it, the code is making a bunch of assumptions all over the place. If you go try to change anything, it's also brittle. You basically need to talk to a bunch of people before you're ever editing code because you might break something.
你很快会发现，整个代码库到处都是相互依赖的假设。你稍微改动一点点，就有可能让系统崩溃。所以你在写代码前，基本都得去找一堆人确认，以防你动了哪根“地雷线”。
David: Yes. This is not just Amazon, this is every internet company. The first companies to get to this scale were Amazon, who was this time, there were no internet companies of this scale before. Everybody is realizing you run into this brick wall just from a complexity standpoint when you reach a certain scale.
David：没错。这不仅是亚马逊的问题，而是所有互联网公司的问题。亚马逊是最早发展到这个规模的公司，那时候根本没有其他互联网公司达到过这种体量。所有人都意识到，当公司发展到某个复杂度的临界点时，就会撞上这堵“技术墙”。
This is a huge problem. Jeff is so focused on this. Not only Jeff, his new assistant at this time, is focused on this. His new technical assistant, who is at this point in time, Andy Jassy who was the first. A lot of listeners maybe don't know about this, but anybody familiar with Amazon or who worked at Amazon knows Jeff's shadow. That's a legendary role to have.
这是个大问题，而Jeff对此极度关注。不只是他，他的新助理也非常专注这件事。这个“技术助理”，当时是Andy Jassy——也就是后来的AWS掌门人。很多听众可能不太知道这个角色，但任何熟悉亚马逊或者曾在亚马逊工作过的人都知道“Jeff的影子”这个职位，它是个非常传奇的角色。
Ben: Which was a Microsoft thing before. Bill Gates' TA was the blueprint for this.
Ben：这其实是微软先搞出来的。当年Bill Gates的技术助理（TA）就是这个角色的原型。
David: Technical assistant, exactly. The reason that Jassy becomes Jeff's first shadow is Jassy was a Harvard MBA, he had been a product line launcher, he had launched music for Amazon, he ended up in the marketing department after that. And then 2000–2001, dot-com crash, Amazon acts as the whole marketing department. We're not doing ads anymore, we got to get profitable.
David：对，技术助理。Jassy之所以成为Jeff的第一个“影子”，是因为他当时是哈佛MBA出身，是一位产品线启动者，曾负责亚马逊的音乐品类，后来被调到市场部门。但到了2000–2001年互联网泡沫破灭后，亚马逊解散了整个市场部。他们说：“我们不再做广告了，我们要盈利。”
Jassy was going to get laid off with the whole department, but Jeff liked him. Jeff said, I'm going to save Andy. He's not going to get laid off. I'm going to find something for him to do. While we're figuring this out, let's take this technical assistant idea from Microsoft. He can come to be my shadow, and he creates the role for him.
Jassy原本会跟整个部门一起被裁掉，但Jeff很喜欢他。Jeff说：“我要保住Andy，他不能被裁。我会给他找点事做。”于是他们借鉴了微软的技术助理（TA）角色，让他成为自己的“影子”，这个角色就是为他量身定做的。
Ben: Andy's background is not technical up until this point. He becomes the technical assistant. He's brilliant, but he came in as one of the MBAs who was a category launcher when they were figuring out music, electronics, and all these different verticals that they were going into. I can't remember which one Andy launched, but he was the launcher for music for one of those. I think, fairly recently, within the last five years before this, he had considered a career in the sports industry.
Ben：其实在这之前，Andy并不是技术出身。他是个很聪明的人，但他最初是作为MBA加入亚马逊的，是负责开拓新垂类业务的人之一，当时他们在做音乐、电子产品等新业务。我记不清他是哪个品类的启动负责人，好像是音乐。更有意思的是，就在这之前五年内，他还考虑过去体育行业发展。
David: Oh, yeah. He wanted to be a sportscaster.
David：对，他当时想当体育播报员。
Ben: Yeah, he's like a well known sports nut, has this basement tricked out as a sports bar, and almost took that career path. We're not talking about a distinguished engineer at Amazon who's taking this technical advisor role, because they're this technical luminary. It's a really smart guy who's just a very malleable, facile person.
Ben：对，他是个众所周知的体育迷，家里的地下室被改造成了一个运动酒吧，他当时差点就走上了那条职业道路。我们说的这个技术助理，并不是亚马逊某位卓越的工程师，不是因为他是技术大神才获得这个职位。而是因为他非常聪明，极具适应性、理解力强。
David: It was just an excuse to keep Andy in the company and give him a job. This is now the biggest problem in the company that Jeff has focused on and that Andy's focused on. This is where all these threads come together. I'm just in awe thinking about this.
David：这只是一个让Andy留在公司、有事可做的借口。而眼下，这已经成了公司面临的最大问题，是Jeff和Andy都全力聚焦的事。所有这些线索都汇聚到了一起。我越想越佩服。
If I were looking at this problem of my technical, infrastructure to grind to a halt, we can't ship anything, communication is so hard in the company, the natural thing to do, and I think what most companies would do and did try to do at this point in time, is, okay, we got to improve our communication. We need better coordination loops, more communication, tighter communication, more coordination between teams. We need to build out our engineering management discipline here. We need to build out our processes. We're going to get really efficient to be able to solve this complexity challenge.
如果换作我在处理这种“技术架构陷入停滞、什么都发不了、公司内沟通极其困难”的问题，我想绝大多数公司，包括当时的主流做法，都会说：“我们要提升沟通效率，要建立更好的协调机制，要加强团队间沟通；我们得完善工程管理体系，建立更成熟的流程，让我们在面对这种复杂性时能更高效地应对。”
Ben: At Microsoft, when they encountered this problem a decade or two earlier, they invented the program management role. That was basically the responsibility. It was twofold. There are not enough unicorn people out there who are 10X developers and also unbelievable communicators, so we'll just hire communication mouthpieces for the 10X developers. We can recruit these four sigma, IQ engineer type people, typically terrible communicators.
Ben：在微软，一二十年前遇到这个问题时，他们发明了“项目经理”（program management）这个职位。这个角色的职责很明确：因为这个世界上既是10倍工程师、又是超强沟通者的人太稀有了，所以微软就决定——为这些天才工程师配备“沟通代表”。我们可以招聘智商4σ的工程师，他们技术很强，但沟通往往很差。
Let's just attach a PM to every dev or a PM to every 2–5 devs. That way, they'll have communication associated with what they're doing. All the PMs can talk to each other, they can figure out what's happening between these two teams, then they both go write specs, the engineers write their engineering documents, and then boom, we're off to the races. The PMs can just keep talking it out to make sure that we're all on the same page.
于是我们就为每一个工程师，或每2–5个工程师配一个项目经理。这样就有人负责他们之间的沟通了。PM们之间可以互相交流，搞清楚各团队之间在做什么，然后他们写规格说明书，工程师写工程文档，接着开始开发。PM们继续协调、沟通，确保所有人步调一致。
David: I don't know this. You were one of these people.
David：这个我还真不清楚。你就是当年的PM之一，对吧？
Ben: That was my job. Yeah.
Ben：对，那就是我的工作。
David: Was the Microsoft PM program—it was program management, not product management—was that the origin of the modern Silicon Valley product manager?
David：微软的PM体系，也就是“项目经理”（program management），是不是现在硅谷“产品经理”（product manager）的前身？
Ben: It is specifically the origin of program management. Microsoft considers product management a marketing function. It's owned in the marketing or again, as much more, go to market oriented, or as Microsoft's program manager, is in the engineering org. It's on the same comp ladder and same promotion ladder as engineering.
Ben：准确地说，那是“项目管理”的起源。微软认为“产品管理”是属于市场营销功能的，它隶属于市场部，偏重于Go-to-Market。而微软的“项目经理”是工程部门的一部分，在薪酬等级和晋升通道上都和工程师是一样的。
David: We have fun, maybe special to do with somebody of like, let's trace the history of PM in tech and Silicon Valley.
David：我们应该搞一期特别节目，和某位嘉宾一起追溯一下技术和硅谷PM的历史。
Ben: And let's be specific about what the P stands for there, since it can be very different things.
Ben：对，而且我们得明确，“P”到底代表什么，因为它在不同语境下可能完全不同。
David: Yeah. Okay, that's what most companies would do, even incredibly successful, brilliant, smart companies and founders like Microsoft, Bill Gates, et cetera. That is not what Jeff and Andy decided to do.
David：没错。大多数公司，包括微软、Bill Gates这样非常成功、聪明的企业和创始人，都会选择那种路径。但Jeff和Andy决定的方向完全不是那样。
Ben: How about less communication?
Ben：那我们不如试试“更少的沟通”？
David: How about no communication? This is where, though Tim O'Reilly Web 2.0 influence comes to play in such a bigger way for Amazon and for the Internet, Jeff has been exposed here (and Andy, too, as his TA), to this concept of Web 2.0, this concept of APIs. Jeff just makes this incredible leap and says, we should use APIs internally.
David：不如彻底“不要沟通”？这时候，Tim O'Reilly 和 Web 2.0 的理念就对亚马逊乃至整个互联网产生了巨大影响。Jeff（以及作为他的技术助理的Andy）接触到Web 2.0和API的概念后，Jeff作出了一个极其大胆的跳跃式决策：我们应该在公司内部也使用API。
If we make everything a "hardened interface" was the Amazon term for this. hardened API interface, we can blow up all of this. We're going to say, no communication. You cannot talk to anybody. Everything you do, internally, must be done via APIs, that then anybody else can access whatever they want. They don't have to talk to you.
如果我们把一切都变成“硬化接口”——这是亚马逊内部的说法，即“hardened API接口”——那么我们就能彻底打破目前的问题。我们要说：不要沟通。你不可以找别人谈话。你内部要做的所有事情，都必须通过API完成，任何其他团队只要想访问，就直接用API调用。他们不需要跟你讲一句话。
Ben: It makes sense. If you are thinking about your company like an entrepreneurial organization or perhaps better put a group of individual startups all operating in a very nimble, entrepreneurial way, then you should think about them as separate companies. If all the startups out there are communicating with each other without a BD person, and they're all just pinging each other's APIs, commerce is flowing, and things are getting built, maybe that's the right internal model, too, for the modern next generation type of company.
Ben：这很有道理。如果你把公司视为一个创业型组织，或者更准确地说，是一群灵活运作的小型创业公司，那么你就该把它们当作独立公司来看。如果所有这些创业公司之间不需要业务拓展人员就能互相沟通，靠调用彼此的API就能完成商业合作、构建系统，那也许这正是下一代现代公司的内部运作模型。
David: Academically, thinking around this was in process. I think Amazon is really the first company that did this in practice. This comes to be called service-oriented architecture. Instead of a monolithic codebase software architecture, service-oriented architecture is this. Every small team, every individual feature is its own architecture, completely separate from everything else.
David：在学术界，这类思考当时还在形成中。而亚马逊，应该是第一家真正将其付诸实践的公司。这种模式后来被称为“面向服务架构”（SOA）。与单体代码架构不同，SOA的理念是：每个小团队、每个功能模块都是一个独立架构，完全与其他部分隔离。
Ben: And it's worth teasing out. One is a human cultural thing, which is basically trying to reduce the issue of Metcalfe's Law, where every time you introduce a new person, there becomes an n-squared relationship to all the people that they could communicate to within the organization. This is like an exponentially worse issue as more people join the company.
Ben：这里值得拆分来讲。一方面是人的文化问题，也就是试图解决Metcalfe定律的麻烦：每引入一个新员工，组织内就增加了一个n²级别的沟通关系。这在人数不断扩张的公司里，会造成指数级的复杂性上升。
There's this cultural element that you're talking about there. The services-oriented architecture thing is the engineering counterpart to that same mental model of, okay, well, now we actually are going to build each one of these things as a completely separate application that then all interact to create the user phasing thing.
这是你刚刚提到的文化层面问题。而服务架构就是这套思维模式在工程层面的映射：我们将每个功能都构建成独立的应用程序，再让它们之间通过接口协作，最终形成用户面前看到的完整体验。
David: Yup, via APIs. There is a legendary post about this. This is one of the top all-time posts in the history of the Internet.
David：对，全都通过API协作。关于这件事，有一篇堪称传奇的帖子，是互联网历史上最重要的文章之一。
Ben: Is it the Steve Yegge?
Ben：你是说Steve Yegge那篇吗？
David: This is the Stevie Yegge rant. Then Google engineer at the time, this post happened much later. About this period in time at Amazon, he had been working at Amazon at this time and then moved over to Google later. Shout out to Jeremy Diamond in the Acquired Slack for reminding us about this.
David：对，就是Steve Yegge那篇“狂怒帖”（rant）。他后来成了Google工程师，但这篇帖子的内容讲的是他在亚马逊这段时间的经历。后来他去了Google。感谢Acquired的Slack社群里的Jeremy Diamond提醒我们这篇文章。
Ben: The funniest thing is the way that this got public, by the way, is he was at Google, and they had just launched Google+. He meant to post it internally, but it turned into an external Google+ public thing. It obviously went viral, because if you hear, this person meant to email their own internal organization. Instead, they leaked it out on the Internet because the product is so poorly designed that this person who was working on the product could not determine the difference between internal posting and external posting. That is just catnip.
Ben：最搞笑的是，这篇文章是怎么被公开的。他当时在Google，而Google+刚上线。他本来是想内部发文，结果一不小心发成了Google+的“公开动态”。这件事很快就传开了，因为你一听就知道这个故事太吸睛了：一个人原本要发公司内部的文章，结果因为产品设计太差，连参与开发这个产品的人都分不清“内部”与“公开”之间的区别，最后不小心把它泄露到了整个互联网。这种八卦简直就是毒药，谁能忍住不看？
David: The meta story to this post is just as good as the actual post itself. It just illustrates the difference between Google culture and Amazon culture so clearly. He starts off just bashing on Amazon culture. They don't care, but he talks about the hardened interface, that that's how Amazon thought about things. He talks about Rick Dalzell.
David：关于这篇文章的“幕后故事”本身就和它的内容一样精彩，它非常清楚地展示了Google文化和亚马逊文化的差异。他一开始就在猛怼亚马逊的文化，说他们冷酷无情。但他也提到“硬化接口”（hardened interface），说那就是亚马逊的思维方式。他还提到了Rick Dalzell。
I don't think we mentioned in the previous episode, Rick was an army ranger before going to work at Walmart. He would just terrorize everybody, all the developers. He himself was a hardened interface, Amazon is so terrible, Bezos is so terrible, they're so mean, and blah-blah-blah-blah-blah, all this stuff.
我记得我们在上一期节目没提到过，Rick在去沃尔玛之前是个陆军突击队员。他当时在亚马逊简直把所有工程师都吓坏了。他本人就像是个“硬化接口”。他觉得亚马逊太糟糕，贝索斯太严厉，全公司都很刻薄，等等等等。
It's all just a warm up to the main point of the post, which is where he says, look. Amazon gets everything wrong. We're better at everything at Google, but there's one thing. There's one very, very, very important thing that Amazon kicks our ass in. It's this.
但这一切只是铺垫，为了引出文章的重点。他说：“看，亚马逊什么都做得不好，我们Google在所有方面都更强——但有一件事，亚马逊远远甩我们一大截。这件事极其重要。”
Ben: I think this is 2010-ish to anchor this time period.
Ben：我记得这是大概2010年左右的事。
David: Yeah, 2010–2011. It was whenever Google+ launched, so that feels about right. Steve writes that Jeff—and Andy is part of this—sent a memo out to the whole company at Amazon. It was a big mandate.
David：对，2010到2011年左右。正好是Google+上线的时间段，时间大致吻合。Steve写道：Jeff（Andy也参与其中）向全公司下达了一项重大命令。
"Jeff's big mandate went something along these lines.
“Jeff 的这份指令大致如下：
(1) All teams will henceforth expose their data and functionality through service interfaces.
(1) 从现在开始，所有团队必须通过服务接口（service interfaces）对外公开其数据和功能。
(2) Teams must communicate with each other through these interfaces.
(2) 团队之间必须通过这些接口来进行沟通。
(3) There will be no other form of inter process communication allowed. No direct linking, no direct reads of another team's data store, no shared memory model, no backdoors, whatsoever. The only communication allowed is via service interface calls over the network.
(3) 不允许有任何其他形式的进程间通信。禁止直接链接、禁止直接读取其他团队的数据存储、禁止共享内存模型、禁止后门。唯一被允许的沟通方式就是通过网络调用服务接口。
(4) It doesn't matter what technology they use—HTTP, Cobra, PubSub, custom protocols, it doesn't matter. Bezos doesn't care.
(4) 使用哪种技术无所谓——HTTP、Cobra、PubSub、自定义协议，随便。贝索斯不关心这个。
(5) All service interfaces without exception, must be designed from the ground up to be externalizable. That is to say, the team must plan and design to be able to expose the interface to developers in the outside world. No exceptions.
(5) 所有服务接口必须从一开始就被设计成可对外开放的。也就是说，每个团队必须在设计时就考虑，如何将该接口提供给外部开发者。没有任何例外。
(6) Anyone who doesn't do this will be fired.
(6) 不遵守这项规定的员工将被解雇。
(7) Thank you, have a nice day.” He's like, of course, for everybody who used to work at Amazon, you know he didn't say thank you have a nice day, because he's so mean.
(7) 谢谢，祝你有个愉快的一天。” 他还调侃道，所有在亚马逊工作过的人都知道，Jeff根本不会说“谢谢”或“祝你愉快”，因为他太苛刻了。
Ben: This is crazy at the time. If you think about this edict, I remember building web applications in the late 2000s. Of course, I was writing PHP and querying a MySQL database.
Ben：这在当时简直疯狂。回想我自己在2000年代后期开发Web应用程序时，当然就是写PHP，然后直接查询MySQL数据库。
If you told me, oh, yeah, you can't query the MySQL database, even though you have access to it and even though it's owned by your company, you instead have to use this API. It'll go ping this web service, which has permission to directly interact with the database. I'd be like, what, are you kidding me? It'd be so much easier for me to just… and the answer's no, you will be fired.
如果你告诉我：“你不能直接查MySQL数据库，尽管你有权限，它也属于你公司，但你必须调用这个API，它才有权限跟数据库交互。” 我当时肯定会说：“你在开玩笑吧？我直接查不是更快吗？” 而答案是：不，你必须走API，不然你会被炒掉。
David: It's funny. We thought a lot about it in this episode. How do we tell this story for non-technical members of our audience without getting too much into technical weeds? This is all pretty technical now, but I don't think we can avoid it. This is so important.
David：这很有意思。我们在准备这集节目的时候想了很多：怎样才能把这个故事讲给非技术听众听得懂，又不至于陷入太多技术细节？但我们现在讲的确实已经挺技术了，不过我觉得这部分内容无可避免——因为实在太重要了。
The context here is let's zoom back out from service-oriented architecture, APIs, and all this. What's really going on here? What's really going on here is this is the beginning of focus on what makes your beer taste better. All of this junk we're talking about, all this technical junk, it's technical junk from the perspective of what actually matters as a business.
让我们从面向服务架构（SOA）、API等等这些内容中抽离一下，来看本质：这一切的出发点，是为了专注于“什么能让你的啤酒更好喝”。我们谈到的这些“技术杂碎”，从商业角度来看，它们就是一堆杂碎——因为它们并不直接影响真正重要的事情。
What matters as a business is the customer experience, new features, customer satisfaction, revenue, and profits. All of this junk was getting in the way. This is where Jeff has this realization of none of that makes the beer taste better. Let's standardize, get rid of all communication, API-assize, all of it, and then everybody here can spend all of their time just focusing on new features to make the beer taste better on amazon.com.
作为一家企业，真正重要的是用户体验、新功能、客户满意度、收入和利润。而这些技术障碍恰恰在阻碍这些目标的实现。这就是Jeff的顿悟时刻：这些都不会让啤酒变得更好喝。我们要做的是标准化、一切转成API，取消所有内部沟通。这样每个团队就能集中精力，专注于开发那些真正能让amazon.com“啤酒更好喝”的功能。
Ben: Yup. The other thing that it is is a very Amazonian concept of documentation. Of course, they start all these meetings with the six-pagers and the PR/FAQs. We're not doing PowerPoint slides. We're just working backwards from this document of what the customer will actually experience.
Ben：是的。这背后还有一个非常“亚马逊式”的理念：文档导向。他们开会都是从六页文档、PR/FAQ（新闻稿/常见问题）开始。不做PPT，只从“客户最终会体验到什么”这个倒推文档出发。
APIs are a heavily documentation-oriented way of computing. When I'm hitting your API endpoint, there is a strictly documented set of requirements of things I can send you and ways in which you send information back. Whereas if I'm allowed to communicate directly with your database, you and I can have a little conversation, you can tell me like, oh, yeah, that field, we stopped using for this purpose and started using for this other purpose, so just keep that in mind.
API本质上就是一种强文档化的计算方式。当我调用你的API接口时，必须遵循明确记录的规则，知道我能传什么参数、你会返回什么结果。但如果我可以直接访问你的数据库，我们就可以私下聊聊，你可以告诉我：“哦，这个字段我们现在不是用来干那个了，现在换成另一个用途了，你记得别弄错就好。”
There's no keep that in mind in APIs. There's, when you hit this thing, you will get that thing back. It brings this true precision hardened belief in the way in which that thing will respond when I hit it that is documented and you must keep the documentation up to date with the way it actually performs.
但API可没有“你记得就好”这一说。API的规则是：“你发这个请求，我就给你这个结果。”它带来的是一种真正的、可验证的、坚固的“契约思维”。而且文档必须和系统实际行为保持一致，不然就会出问题。
现代版的阿米巴，出现在亚马逊而不是微软、苹果、Google是比较奇怪的。
Ben: All right, we're in story number three at this point. (1) The apocryphal got some extra hardware lying around. (2) This idea that Tim O'Reilly brings up web 2.0 and APIs, so they start working on the Amazon Associates API. (3) This idea of, okay, the organization is moving too slow, and a way to speed it up internally just for our own step one internal use case, is make it so that the teams communicate with each other via API.
Ben：好，现在我们已经讲到了第3个起源故事了。（1）第一个是“过剩服务器”那个虚构版本；（2）第二个是Tim O'Reilly带来了Web 2.0和API的理念，推动他们开发Amazon Associates API；（3）现在这个是组织运转太慢了，为了解决内部问题，第一步就是强制让所有团队通过API互相沟通。
Once they start doing that, and obviously, before Steve Yegge writes his rant and publishes on the Internet, they start realizing, okay, they are parts of this where it may make sense to start being external-facing, because once we get this stuff right, and we've toiled around in the darkness so much trying to get this stuff, right, and I don't think it's helping our customers at all, maybe there are other people out there who are experiencing the same blunt force trauma just trying to keep their infrastructure up and modern.
他们在内部推行这一做法之后——显然是在Steve Yegge写那篇著名“长文”并发布到网上之前——就开始意识到：我们都已经花了这么多力气，把这套系统搞明白、搞健壮了。而我们这些投入，好像对终端客户帮助不大。但可能在这个世界上，还有其他公司也在经历同样的“基础设施折磨”，也在想方设法让系统跟得上时代。也许我们可以对外开放它了。
David: There's one more small compared to the big ideas but inevitable as things were going. One more leap that we should talk about that happens here. everything we just described so far in AWS origin story number three, is related to software engineering and the amazon.com codebase.
David：还有一个虽然相对前面那些“大创意”来说算小，但随着事情发展，它是不可避免的一步。我们得提一下。在AWS的第三个起源故事中，我们描述的这一切都和软件工程、以及amazon.com的代码库有关。
What AWS is is abstracted hardware IT infrastructure. And software, too. But the core like S3, EC2, that's IT infrastructure. How do you get from transforming your software architecture to, oh, now I need cloud IT infrastructure? It's the same problem. It's an inevitable outcome.
而AWS真正的本质，是抽象化的硬件IT基础设施（当然也包括软件）。但像S3、EC2这样的核心服务，其实就是IT基础设施。那么问题来了：你是怎么从软件架构的重构，走到“我们需要云端IT基础设施”这一步的？答案是：这本质上是同一个问题，是顺理成章的结果。
When you transition your software architecture to the service-oriented architecture and no longer a monolithic codebase, IT used to centrally plan, like we were talking about. We can ship these features at these times, we need a code freeze at that time, we need X capacity, we can forecast that, and we can look out into the future. Now with this, you've got all these distributed teams doing God knows what without talking to anybody, IT can't centrally plan anymore.
当你把软件架构从单体代码库转向面向服务架构（SOA）之后，原来那种由IT部门“统一规划”的模式就无法再维持了。以前我们可以说：这个时间上线哪些功能，那个时候要代码冻结，需要多少服务器资源，我们可以做预测、可以做计划。但现在，各个分布式团队各自为战，谁也不知道对方在干什么，IT部门根本无法集中规划。
What Amazon realizes is they need to do the same thing with IT that they did with software engineering, which is transform it also into an API-accessible pool of computing resources, versus I'm giving you this server and that's what you got.
亚马逊意识到，他们得把IT部门也像软件工程一样彻底改造——让IT资源也变成可以通过API访问的计算资源池，而不是“我分配给你一台服务器，你就将就着用”。
Ben: You're talking about just internally. If all these teams are hitting each other's APIs internally, then yeah, there has to be some dynamic way that if a whole bunch more load starts coming in and you weren't told about it, you do have to be able to spin up the hardware to handle that.
Ben：你说的是公司内部的情形。如果所有团队都在调用彼此的API，那确实得有某种动态机制——一旦某个系统突发流量激增，而你事先没收到通知，你也必须能自动扩展底层硬件来处理这些流量。
David: It's brilliant of like, well, let's just make that an API, too. We can place an API call into IT. They have a pool of computing resources.
David：这个思路太棒了：那我们干脆连这个也API化吧。我们向IT发一个API请求，让它从计算资源池中调配资源。
Ben: But much harder than it sounds.
Ben：但这听起来容易，做起来难多了。
David: Yes.
David：完全没错。
Ben: Oh, yeah. IT can just become an API.
Ben：哦，太好了，IT就成了一个API接口。（笑）
David: No, this is a multi year journey for IT at Amazon, too. Of course, it wasn't like Bezos just sent the email that Steve Yegge described and everything happened overnight.
David：当然不是。对于亚马逊的IT部门来说，这也是一个耗时数年的转型之路。贝索斯并不是像Steve Yegge文章描述的那样发了封邮件，第二天一切就都完成了。
Ben: Yeah. Okay, so what you're telling me then is Bezos gets excited about this, Jassy starts working with him on it, they're basically translating this idea of the first little nugget that you planted is we should make sure that all of the APIs that we're making available internally, we should design them in mind as if they could be externally consumed at some point. But you haven't yet told me, how does some commercial offering eventually become available? And what is the commercial offering to third-party customers?
Ben：对，那你现在跟我说的就是：贝索斯对这个模式非常兴奋，Jassy开始跟他一起做这件事。他们基本上是在推进最初那个小念头：“我们在内部构建的API，都应该以未来可能对外开放为前提来设计。”但你还没告诉我的是，这怎么最后变成了一个可以对外销售的商业产品？亚马逊是怎么把这个服务卖给第三方客户的？
David: All right, we're now in mid-2003. This has been this huge transformative project within Amazon over the last 18 months. Jassy has been working a lot on it as Jeff's TA. Jeff's like, okay, Andy, it's time for you to go back out into the company. You're done being my TA. You have to go become a leader of something within the company.
David：好，现在时间是2003年中。过去18个月，这项变革在亚马逊内部已经推进得如火如荼。Jassy作为Jeff的技术助理也参与得很深。Jeff对他说：“好啦，Andy，是时候回到公司一线了。你做我的助理的时间到了，你得去公司内部真正带领点什么。”
It's almost like an echo of Jeff and David Shaw back at D.E. Shaw. They start thinking together like, okay, Andy, what are you going to do? What's the new thing? You're going to go lead within Amazon? Andy's probably happy he didn't leave Amazon, I think.
这情景几乎像当年Jeff和David Shaw在D.E. Shaw的互动。他们一起思考：“Andy，你接下来要干嘛？你要在亚马逊内部带领一个新项目？”我猜Andy当时应该很庆幸自己没离开亚马逊吧（笑）。
They come together to this idea of, well, maybe there's an opportunity to take the API-based IT infrastructure that we're developing here and offer it to third-parties. The legend goes, Andy puts together a six-pager.
他们共同想出了一个点子：“或许我们可以把这个基于API的IT基础设施对外开放，提供给第三方公司。”传说中，Andy写了一份“六页文档”来正式提出这个想法。
Ben: This is the official Amazon legend. You can read about stuff about amazon.com
Ben：这是亚马逊的官方传说之一。你在讲amazon.com的资料里也能读到类似的故事。
David: Yup. It's in official Amazon documents. Everything in Amazon happens in written narratives and six-pagers. He writes the six-pager. Famously, he has to tinker with the margins and adjust them to fit everything on the six pages.
David：没错，这是写进亚马逊官方文件的。亚马逊所有事都要靠叙述文档和“六页纸”来推进。他写了那份六页文档。众所周知，他为了把所有内容塞进六页里，还得调整页边距和排版。
He can't fit financial projections on there. There are no financial projections in this document. Then he whiteboards them out on the spot in the meeting with the S-Team and the board where he's proposing this big grand vision to take over Amazon Web Services, relaunch it with this new vision of being cloud IT infrastructure.
他根本放不下财务预测，文档里没有财务模型。他只好在和S-Team及董事会的会议上，当场在白板上手绘财务预测。他提出的是一个宏大的愿景：接管Amazon Web Services，并以“云IT基础设施”这个全新定位重新出发。
In the document, there is an ask a proposal to hire 57 new people to go pursue this initiative. Andy talks about he's so nervous going into the meeting. This is such a huge career moment. He's asking for 57 people. Nobody asks for 57 people. It's a ballsy move. He's risking everything. Jeff loves it, the board loves it, the S-Team loves it, and it gets approved.
在那份六页文档里，他提出的资源请求是：新招57人来推进这个项目。Andy自己回忆说，他走进会议室时紧张得不行——这对他的职业生涯来说是一次大考。他开口就要57人，没人这么干的，这可是个大胆的举动，他几乎赌上了自己的一切。但结果是：Jeff非常喜欢，董事会喜欢，S-Team也喜欢，最终批准了这个提案。
I think all that actually happened or happened in some way, shape, or form. We mentioned Collin Brier who was running AWS until this point, Andy and Collin swapped places. Andy goes in, takes over AWS, and Collin becomes Jeff's next shadow.
我觉得这些事情基本都是真的，或者至少大体是真的。我们之前提到Collin Brier——他是AWS最初的负责人。Andy和Collin后来互换了角色：Andy接手AWS，Collin则成为了Jeff的下一任“影子”（技术助理）。
Ben: Oh, I didn't realize that. Andy, right away, took over the publishing of images via the Amazon Associates API, that fledgling AWS?
Ben：哦，我之前没意识到。那就是Andy直接接手了通过Amazon Associates API发布商品图片的那个初代AWS？
David: Either that happened or this is part of the Amazon corporate history, hand-waving. All of it just went smoothly. Collin becomes Jeff's shadow. He then goes on to run IMDb when Amazon acquires IMDb. Then later, he would leave Amazon, teamed up with Bill Carr who ran Prime Video, and then they write *Working Backwards*.
David：也许是这样，也可能是亚马逊公司历史里“顺理成章式”的讲法。总之，一切发展得很顺利。Collin成为了Jeff的“影子”，后来在亚马逊收购IMDb后负责IMDb。再之后，他离开了亚马逊，与曾负责Prime Video的Bill Carr搭档，合写了《Working Backwards》。
I didn't realize this. This is brilliant. They now have a consulting firm together as part of *Working Backwards* to help companies implement the Amazon culture. It's freaking brilliant.
我之前没注意到这一点。这太聪明了。他们现在一起开了一家咨询公司，以《Working Backwards》的名义帮助其他企业实践亚马逊文化。真的太绝了。
Back to Andy. He gets approval. He can hire 57 people. He recruits Adam Selipsky to come in and join the company. Adam, of course, would later leave AWS to become CEO of Tableau, and is now back at AWS where he is now CEO of AWS.
回到Andy。他获得批准，可以招57人。他招募了Adam Selipsky加入团队。Adam后来离开AWS，成为Tableau的CEO；再后来又回归，现在是AWS的首席执行官。
Ben: I watched every single re\:Invent keynote to prepare for this, which I will tell you, that is a lot of IT conference keynote watching. The most recent one is Adam Selipsky. It's like 10–11 years of Jassy up there on stage and you finally get a different voice. It's a little bit jarring, especially when you're mainlining them all back to back when it's suddenly not Andy Jassy. Yeah, Adam is the guy now.
Ben：我为了准备这期节目，把每一届re\:Invent的主旨演讲都看了一遍——这可是大量的IT大会视频。最近一次主讲人是Adam Selipsky。此前连续10到11年都是Jassy站在台上，现在突然换了声音，换了风格，尤其当你连续刷着看所有演讲时，突然不是Andy Jassy了，真的有点违和。但现在，Adam就是掌舵人了。
David: Do you know who else was in that first wave of external recruits who come in to join AWS?
David：你知道AWS早期那一波外部招募里，还有谁吗？
Ben: I do not.
Ben：我不知道。
David: Jeff Lawson.
David：Jeff Lawson。
Ben: Oh, no way. The CEO of Twilio?
Ben：不会吧？是Twilio的CEO？
David: Yes.
David：没错。
Ben: Wow.
Ben：哇哦。
David: Which totally makes sense that Twilio would come out of AWS.
David：所以Twilio从AWS体系中孕育出来就完全说得通。
Ben: Yes, of course.
Ben：当然。
David: I think all of this really happens. Andy does write this doc, he does take over AWS, he absolutely builds and leads AWS from what it was, which was very different into what it is today. I think there's a little more to the story, too.
David：我认为这些都确实发生过。Andy确实写了这份文档，也确实接管了AWS。他把一个完全不同的初代AWS一点点打造为今天的样子。但我觉得故事远不止这些。
Ben: It's a convenient narrative. It's also a little bit odd that this idea could come from someone who wasn't in the muck.
Ben：这故事讲得很顺，但也有点奇怪，这个想法竟然来自一个一开始并没有亲自“下泥塘”的人。
David: It's actually a really good interview that Andy does with Harvard i-Lab in 2013. That's on YouTube. They're talking about the origin of AWS. I think the topic is intrapreneurship at companies, which is my God, the most disgusting word of all time.
David：有一个访谈非常不错，是2013年Andy在哈佛i-Lab做的，在YouTube上能找到。他谈到了AWS的起源。那场谈话的主题是“公司内部创业”——说真的，这是我听过最让人反胃的词之一。
Andy in the talk, he's like, well, we had to decide, as part of this vision document and the discussion around it, how do we launch this? Do we pick just one service, one IT primitive, and launch with that? Or do we put together a whole bunch of things and launch them all together? He says what they ended up doing was they got a tiger team together of the 10 best technical minds inside the company.
Andy在访谈中说，他们当时必须决定一个问题：作为这份愿景文件的一部分，也是整个讨论的核心，我们到底是挑一个IT原始服务先推出来，还是干脆把一整套东西都打包推出？最终，他们组建了一支“虎队”，聚集了公司内最顶尖的10位技术人才。
They deconstructed all the major web services, web applications of today, amazon.com itself, Google, eBay, he doesn't mention them by name, but I assume the other big web services of the time, big web applications, and then figured out what you would need to re architect those services based on this new cloud IT primitive infrastructure.
他们把当时的所有主流Web服务和应用程序做了技术解构，包括amazon.com本身、Google、eBay等，虽然他没点名，但大概就是当时的主要互联网服务商。然后他们试图搞清楚，如果你要用新的“云计算原语”来重构这些服务，需要什么。
They come up with a list. They decide you need storage, you need compute, you need databases, and you need a content distribution network, like what Akamai was to be able to recreate any internet service of scale.
他们列出一个清单：你需要存储、计算、数据库，还需要一个内容分发网络——类似于Akamai当时所做的——才能重建一个具有规模的互联网服务。
Ben: I love that you say ‘was,’ like what Akamai was.
Ben：我喜欢你用了“was”这个词——Akamai当年的样子（笑）。
David: Story for another day, perhaps. They decided, you know what? We can’t fulfill our promise to developers if you can build web applications of scale with us, unless we launch with all of those services. We're going to build them all, and that's why we need 57 people.
David：也许这个故事我们以后再讲。他们得出一个结论：如果我们承诺开发者能够在AWS上构建大规模Web应用，那我们就必须一次性推出所有这些服务。我们得把这些全部建出来——这就是为什么我们要57个人。
Andy would later say a great quote and this is absolutely true. He says, "If you believe developers will build applications from scratch using web services as primitive building blocks, then the operating system becomes the Internet." That sounds true. That's what AWS is today. They're going to launch with everything they need to build a whole operating system.
Andy后来有一句非常经典的引语，而且完全准确。他说：“如果你相信开发者会从零开始，使用Web服务作为原语构建应用程序，那么操作系统就变成了互联网。” 这听起来确实成立。这正是今天的AWS。他们打算推出所有构成完整操作系统所需的东西。
This is where the official narrative just completely falls apart, because that is totally not what happened, not even a little bit.
但这也正是“官方叙事”彻底崩塌的地方——因为真实的情况根本不是这样，连一点都不像。
Ben: Nope. In fact, I can recall, personally, using Amazon S3 for something I was working on, and there was no EC2.
Ben：不是的。事实上我记得很清楚，当年我用亚马逊的S3做项目时，根本还没有EC2。
David: Yes. Unlike myth number one about AWS origins, you couldn't just take excess amazon.com IT capacity and externalize it. They had to go build all this from scratch as external services. It takes a couple of years to do that, for everything. In fairness, maybe in defense of the official narrative, they do start working on all of these suite of services all at once, and it just takes a while to get them all built. That probably is true, but yeah, S3 is the first service to launch by itself in March 2006.
David：没错。和关于AWS起源的“神话一”不同，他们并不是把amazon.com多余的IT资源对外开放。事实上他们是从零开始搭建这一切，把它们做成外部服务。要构建完整体系需要几年时间。公平地说，也许可以为官方说法辩护一下——他们确实是同步启动多个服务的开发，只是完成这些服务需要时间。这个说法可能是真的。但确实，S3是第一个单独推出的服务，发布于2006年3月。
Ben: Let's talk about it. It was an independently useful thing. S3 (Simple Storage Service), is a place that is available on the Internet. You don't have to think about where it is; it's in the cloud. You can dump images there if you're an application developer and then elsewhere from your application, or other applications, or no applications. If you just want to access the image directly by URL, you can access.
Ben：我们来讲讲这个服务。S3（简单存储服务）本身就非常有用。它是一个互联网上的存储空间。你不需要去想它的物理位置——它就在云端。如果你是应用开发者，可以把图片上传到那儿，然后在应用内或其它程序中调用这些图片。甚至你没有应用，只是想通过URL直接访问图片，也完全没问题。
It's not just images, it's anything that you want to store up there. It's this wonderful, magical, amazing thing, where I don't have to buy a server, I don't have to configure a server, I don't have to rack a server, I don't have to think about maintaining a server, and I only pay as I go. It is insanely cheap.
而且不只是图片，任何你想存的东西都可以放上去。这是一个很神奇、很惊艳的服务。我不需要买服务器、不需要配置服务器、不需要上架服务器、不需要维护它，而且是按使用量付费，价格便宜到不可思议。
David: Yeah. S3 launches in March 2006. EC2 launches a few months later, I think, in beta in August 2006.
David：是的。S3在2006年3月发布，EC2几个月后发布，我记得是在2006年8月以测试版上线。
Ben: What is EC2?
Ben：那EC2是什么？
David: EC2 is Elastic Compute Cloud, which is the compute counterpart to the storage part of AWS and S3.
David：EC2是“弹性计算云”，它是AWS中对应于S3存储部分的“计算”模块。
Ben: A simple way to think about EC2 is if you were a web application developer at the time, like I was, and you were writing stuff and you were running it on local hosts on your computer, and you had previously been deploying it to some server in a data center that you can Telnet to, ping, and see it had an IP address, you could basically spin up an EC2 instance and treat it like that, except it didn't have persistent storage associated with it. You can think about it like a computer without a hard drive that happens to live in the cloud and is yours until you stop using it.
Ben：一个简单的理解方式是，如果你当时是一个Web应用开发者，就像我当年一样，你会在本地开发，然后部署到某个数据中心里的服务器，通过Telnet登录、ping通、用IP地址访问它。而现在你可以直接启用一个EC2实例，把它当成那样的服务器来用，只不过它没有永久存储。你可以把它想象成一台没有硬盘、但在云端运行的计算机，它是你的，一直到你停止使用为止。
David: It's your processor in the cloud, CloudFront, which is the content delivery network (the CDN), the Akamai part of the puzzle piece, launches in 2008. The first major database offering, RDS (relational database service), doesn't actually launch until 2009.
David：它就是你在云端的“处理器”。CloudFront，也就是内容分发网络（CDN），也就是AWS拼图中的“Akamai部分”，在2008年发布。而AWS第一个主要的数据库服务RDS（关系型数据库服务），直到2009年才推出。
Ben: Importantly, RDS, it wasn't like you just start using RDS and now you don't have to use any of the stuff you've been using before. RDS would run the database that you were already using. I can't remember if it actually launched with Postgres, but assume you're normally self hosting Postgres on your server or you have a separate database server that you're used to running that runs Postgres. Now, you use RDS and it runs Postgres, and all your queries work, and you can treat it like it's your own database server.
Ben：重要的一点是，RDS并不是说你用了它，就不需要原来那些数据库技术了。它其实运行的就是你原本就在用的数据库系统。我记不清它最早有没有支持Postgres，但假设你原本就是自己在服务器上部署Postgres，或者你有一台专门跑Postgres的数据库服务器。现在你可以直接用RDS来跑Postgres，你的所有查询照常运行，而且你可以把它当成你自己的数据库服务器来用。
David: That's the most obvious crack in the official narrative of the AWS origin, which brings us to the fourth origin story of AWS, the dissenting narrative, if you will.
David：这正是AWS官方起源故事中最明显的一条裂缝，也引出了我们要讲的第四个起源故事，也可以称之为“持异议的版本”。
Ben: At this point, the compass and story number one was 180 degrees off, and then in story number two, it got 90 degrees off. We're fine tuning now. Story three is basically right, but probably doesn't just include the full set of people that could have been written into the narrative.
Ben：从现在来看，第一个版本的方向完全错了180度，第二个版本偏了90度。而到了第三个版本，基本上方向是对的，但可能遗漏了一些应该被写进故事里的人物。
David: I think story number four is basically right, too, but three and four are the same.
David：我认为第四个版本基本上也是对的，其实它和第三个版本是同时发生、并行存在的。
Ben: Success has many fathers.
Ben：成功总是有很多“父亲”。
David: Yes. Concurrently and separately, to everything we just said in story number three, Andy Jassy is working on Jeff's TA on this big problem, writing the vision doc, the business plan, and all that, hiring 57 people. In 2003, a network engineer at Amazon named Benjamin Black is working on the IT architecture transition that we talked about. He's working with Chris Pinkham, who is his boss, who, in fact, oversees all of network engineering within it at Amazon. Chris reports to Rick Dalzell, the CIO of Amazon.
David：没错。与第三个版本中的一切并行发生的是：Andy Jassy正作为Jeff的技术助理（TA）处理这个重大问题，撰写愿景文件和商业计划，提出雇佣57人的建议。而与此同时，在2003年，亚马逊的一位网络工程师Benjamin Black正在负责我们之前提到的IT架构转型工作。他的上司是Chris Pinkham，负责整个网络工程团队，Chris直接向亚马逊的CIO Rick Dalzell汇报。
The two of them—Benjamin and Chris—write a six-pager about how they actually are going to restructure the network engineering part of the IT architecture to the new model that the company is moving to. At the end of this document, supposedly, they mentioned that with the architecture that they have in mind, Amazon might actually be able to use that same architecture to sell virtual compute servers as a service to third-party developers. Indeed, Amazon could do that.
Benjamin和Chris两人一起写了一份六页文件，阐述他们打算如何将网络工程部分的IT架构重构为公司正转向的新模型。据说在这份文件的最后，他们提到，以他们设想的这个架构，亚马逊实际上可能可以将这些虚拟计算服务器作为服务出售给第三方开发者。也就是说，亚马逊完全可以这么做。
Ben: Now here's where things get murky, because that document definitely does exist. This idea that most of it is focused on, here's how we're going to execute our plan, and also, we could sell that Infrastructure as a Service. Here's where Ben Black, and his blog posts on the subject, and then future interviews he gives with Network World and others, are very insistent that they then showed this to Jeff Bezos. The proposal made its way to Jeff Bezos.
Ben：现在事情开始变得扑朔迷离了，因为那份文件确实存在。文件的大部分内容都是在说“我们要如何执行这个架构重组计划”，但最后也提到“我们可以将这套基础设施作为服务卖出去”。Benjamin Black在自己的博客和后续接受《Network World》等媒体采访时都非常坚持认为，他们确实把这个想法展示给了Jeff Bezos。这个提议的确传达到了贝索斯那里。
David: Yup, I think first to Rick and then to Jeff.
David：是的，我记得是先给了Rick（Dalzell），然后才到Jeff。
Ben: And he greenlit their project.
Ben：而且贝索斯批准了他们的项目。
David: Yes, separately from the rest of AWS.
David：没错，这是在AWS整体项目之外，单独批准的。
Ben: What I can't tell is, did this, before it got in front of Jeff, get merged into Andy's proposal and it was greenlit as one big thing, or where they're actually two different concurrent efforts?
Ben：我不确定的是，在这个提案送到Jeff面前之前，它是否被合并进了Andy的计划中，并作为一个整体被批准了，还是说其实是两个同时进行的独立项目？
David: We're going to tell the story, and then I have some thoughts on all this. Chris is actually from South Africa. Right around the same time, he and his family want to move back to South Africa, leave Seattle and move back to Cape Town in South Africa.
David：我们先把这个故事讲完，然后我会谈谈我的一些看法。Chris其实是南非人。大约就在这个时期，他和家人决定搬回南非，离开西雅图，回到开普敦。
He goes to Rick, his boss, and says, hey, I'm actually going to leave and move back, move family back. Rick is like. Oh, no, we're in the middle of this huge architecture transition. This is a key moment in the company. You are a super valuable person at the company.
他去找他的上司Rick说：“嘿，我打算离职，带着家人搬回去了。” Rick说：“天啊不行啊，我们现在正处在一个重大的架构转型阶段，这是公司关键的时刻，你是我们非常重要的人才。”
What if we do the same thing we're doing in Palo Alto with A9 and Lab126? We'll set up a new Amazon subsidiary in Cape Town, South Africa that you can lead. We can retain your talents, and we can figure out what that new subsidiary will do. Chris is like, oh, okay, that sounds good.
Rick提议说：“我们可以仿照我们在帕洛阿尔托对A9和Lab126的做法，在南非开普敦设立一个新的亚马逊子公司，由你来领导。这样我们既能保住你，也可以再决定这个新子公司具体做什么。”Chris表示：“好啊，这听起来不错。”
Chris and Rick start thinking about this and they decide, well, we just had this idea, Benjamin and I, in that paper that we wrote about selling virtualized servers to third parties. What if we work on that at the new subsidiary? So they do. Benjamin doesn't come along, but Chris and a really, really great engineer named Chris Brown.
Chris和Rick开始考虑这个方向。他们想：“我和Benjamin在那份文件中不是刚提到一个主意吗？就是将虚拟服务器作为服务出售给第三方。我们可以让新子公司来做这件事。”于是他们就这么决定了。Benjamin没有加入这个团队，但Chris带上了一位非常出色的工程师Chris Brown。
Ben: From what I can tell, this is where Ben Black's involvement ends, where he was part of pitching the idea, but it's not actually a part of building the thing that they're going to build in South Africa.
Ben：据我了解，到这里为止，Ben Black的参与就告一段落了。他是提出想法的一员，但没有真正参与到南非那边产品的开发过程中。
David: Yup. Chris and Chris go off to South Africa. They start working independently on this compute server idea, and they do. That becomes EC2. It's that team in South Africa that builds EC2.
David：没错。Chris和Chris去了南非，开始独立开发这个计算服务器的构想，最后他们真的做出来了。这就是后来的EC2。是南非那个团队打造了EC2。
Brad Stone writes in *The Everything Store*, "EC2 was born in isolation with Pinkham talking to his colleagues in Seattle only sporadically, at least for the first year. Pinkham later said that the solitude was beneficial as it offered a comfortable distance from Amazon's intrusive CEO." Quote from Pinkham: "I spent most of my time trying to hide from Bezos," Pinkham says. "He was a fun guy to talk to, but you did not want to be his pet project. He would love it to distraction." Hilarious.
Brad Stone在《一网打尽》（*The Everything Store*）一书中写道：“EC2是在孤立的环境下诞生的，Pinkham在头一年里几乎很少与西雅图的同事交流。他后来表示，这种孤立是有益的，因为它让他可以与亚马逊那位喜欢插手的CEO保持舒适的距离。” Pinkham的原话是：“我大多数时间都在试图躲避Bezos。他是个聊起来很有趣的人，但你可不想成为他的宠儿项目，他会宠到让人无法专心。”太搞笑了。
Ben: You can start to see even in these very public, reasonably nice quotes that there's enough tension between Chris Pinkham and Bezos-Jassy leadership that even in the official Amazon, things that they put out about the development in South Africa, Chris Pinkham's name is nowhere to be found, even in the South Africa–specific blog post about the history of EC2. There's clearly chafing between Chris and the leadership.
Ben：从这些公开、看起来还算客气的言论中就能看出，Chris Pinkham与Bezos、Jassy领导层之间的紧张关系已经很明显了。哪怕是在亚马逊自己发布的关于南非开发工作的官方文章里，也根本没提到Chris Pinkham的名字。甚至在专门讲EC2在南非诞生的博客中也找不到他。显然他和高层之间有一些摩擦。
David: Yup, and Andy Jassy's infamous one-star review of *The Everything Store* on amazon.com. In one of the several passages where he talks about how Brad had it all wrong, here's a quote from Andy: "The vision document proposing the AWS business and outlining the initial set of services for AWS including our compute service (EC2) was finished and presented to the executive team in September 2003. I wrote the document and was lucky to have the help of several people in putting it together." This was about a year before Chris Pinkham moved to South Africa to build the initial version of EC2.
David：是的，Andy Jassy 在 amazon.com 上对《一网打尽》留下了臭名昭著的一星评价。在他多段评论中提到 Brad Stone 的描述完全错了。以下是Jassy的一段引述：“关于AWS业务的愿景文件，以及AWS初始服务集（包括我们的计算服务EC2）是在2003年9月完成并提交给高管团队的。我撰写了这份文件，并很幸运地得到了几位同事的协助。”那是在 Chris Pinkham 搬去南非开发EC2初始版本前大约一年。
Chris played an integral role in the definition, team building, and product building of EC2 despite leaving before EC2 was launched. Clearly, there's some bad blood here, but my thoughts. I want your thoughts, too. I just find this whole thing ridiculous, because of course, it doesn't matter.
尽管Chris在EC2发布前就离开了，但他在产品定义、团队建设以及开发过程中扮演了不可或缺的角色。显然，这里面存在一些恩怨。不过，我想谈谈我的看法，也想听听你的。我觉得这一切实在有点荒谬——因为，说到底，这些争议根本无关紧要。
The most ridiculous thing is that what I think actually happened here, which is there were multiple teams working on multiple related things within the company, that's how Amazon prides itself on running, decentralized innovation. That was the whole point of this whole freaking exercise. Decentralize, let teams innovate, what’s Jeff say? *Invent and Wander* is the mantra of him and the company.
最荒谬的是，真正发生的情况其实是：公司内部有多个团队在处理多个相关项目。而这正是亚马逊引以为傲的运营方式——去中心化的创新。这一切努力的核心就是：去中心化，让各个团队自由创新。Jeff经常说什么来着？“发明与漫游”（Invent and Wander），这正是他和亚马逊的座右铭。
I think that's what actually happened. The official version now of AWS history of it was all centrally planned, it was all in that 2003 document, that just seems silly to me and counterproductive.
我觉得那才是事实。而现在官方版的AWS发展史却说一切都是集中计划、全部写在2003年的那份文件里，这在我看来非常可笑，甚至是适得其反的。
Ben: I agree. The other thing that becomes clear is, it's really not about the idea. It's about the execution. I know this is a trope. To make it a little bit more specific, it can be about the idea if you define the idea as the hundreds of micro ideas that comprise the main idea. But if you're saying that the idea is something articulated in a sentence, that's pretty much worthless.
Ben：我同意。还有一点越来越明显：关键并不在于那个“点子”，而在于执行。我知道这听起来像老生常谈。但如果我们把“点子”理解为由数百个微小创意组成的体系，那当然是重要的。但如果你只是说一句话表达一个点子，那几乎没有任何价值。
Maybe even in a vision doc, it's about the thousands of micro decisions you make while executing it and actually doing the work to execute it that ends up mattering. History is written by the victors, so we're seeing some of that play out here. The other thing that's very clear, as Andy Jassy is just a brilliant strategist and fantastic leader.
哪怕是在愿景文档中，真正重要的还是你在执行中做出的成千上万个微决策。历史是由胜利者书写的，所以我们现在看到的，其实就是这种胜利者叙事的一部分。还有一点很清楚，那就是Andy Jassy确实是一位卓越的战略家和杰出的领导者。
Of course, someone like him in the organization would end up actually running it. I don't even know why there's dispute over, well, it was my idea. It's like, well, who cares? Who's going to end up turning this thing into a world-changing business?
像他这样的人最终能够执掌AWS是理所当然的。我甚至不明白为什么还会有人争论“这是我的点子”。重点不是这个好吗？重要的是——是谁真正把它变成了一个改变世界的业务？
David: You had that great playbook theme and takeaway from the amazon.com episode that I think you posted as a clip on Twitter and LinkedIn that went so viral. People who were originally Amazon employees loved it, which was your idea that Amazon was a pathfinding algorithm.
David：你在之前关于amazon.com那集里总结的一个思维框架非常棒，我记得你把那段剪辑发到了Twitter和LinkedIn，结果疯传开来了。很多前亚马逊员工都很喜欢。你说亚马逊的运作方式就像一个“路径搜索算法”。
Ben: Yeah, it was brute forcing its way through a maze to eventually find the correct way by just gathering data. Launch stuff, gather data, tear it down, and start again.
Ben：对，像是用蛮力在迷宫中不断试错、积累数据，最终找到正确的路径。发布新产品，收集数据，发现不对就推倒重来，再试一次。
David: Yup. Go through the maze, hit a dead end, backtrack a step or two, go take another path. I think that actually is also how AWS launched.
David：没错。走进迷宫，遇到死路就退几步，换条路径再走。我认为AWS的诞生其实也是这个过程的真实写照。
Ben: Early on, but I want to get to that in my playbook, because I think it actually contrast that in some ways.
Ben：这点我稍后想在我的行动手册（playbook）中展开讲讲，因为我认为它其实在某些方面恰好形成了对比。
David: Okay, fun.
David：好啊，挺有趣的。
Ben: All right, it launches. The last thing to highlight here is the importance of the primitives. I don't know how intentional it was in the moment, but it became something that later on would become hugely important to them, which is that they truly were unopinionated about this as a platform.
Ben：好了，AWS上线了。这里最后要强调的是“基础构件”（primitives）的重要性。我不确定他们当时是不是有意为之，但这后来变得极为关键——他们在平台层面上保持了绝对的中立态度。
They said, we're going to launch with primitives. It's the most basic storage, it's the most basic compute, it's the most basic way to host your databases, it's the most basic CDN, and we can't wait to see what developers build in an innovative way with our absolute bare bones architecture, that would go on to be called Infrastructure as a Service as a category.
他们说，我们只提供最基本的构件：最基础的存储、最基础的计算能力、最基础的数据库托管方式、最基础的CDN。我们非常期待开发者能用这些极简的架构，开发出有创意的产品。后来，这类服务被称为“基础设施即服务”（Infrastructure as a Service）。
Again, I do not know if it was an intentional thing or not when they were first launching it. But they did not say, let's try and build a new OS, a new programming paradigm. No, we're just going to give you super basic building blocks, and you run with it.
再次强调，我不知道他们一开始是不是有意这样做的。但他们并没有说我们要开发一个全新的操作系统或编程范式。不，他们只是给出最基础的构建块，然后就交给开发者去自由发挥了。
David: All that's on the technical side we've been spending a lot of time there. We've alluded to this, but let's talk about what a radical innovation this was on the business and market side. I've got a great quote here. "When S3 launched," probably at the same time that you were playing around with it, "a truly world class, fantastic engineer at Microsoft at the time by the name of James Hamilton,” who's now an S-Team member and SVP Distinguished Engineer at Amazon, “because of what he saw with AWS, he wrote on his personal blog about trying out S3 when it launched with a personal project"
David：我们刚才讲了很多技术层面的东西。现在来看看商业和市场方面，这其实是一场颠覆性的创新。我这有一个很棒的引述。“当S3发布时，”也许就是你玩它的那个时候，“当时微软的一位世界级顶尖工程师James Hamilton——现在是亚马逊S-Team成员兼高级副总裁及杰出工程师——因为他看到AWS的潜力，在自己的博客上写下了他用S3做个人项目的经历。”
Here's a quote from him. "What was even more disruptive was a credit card was all that was needed to provision storage. There was no required proposal for financial approval. There was no RFP, no vendor selection process, no vendor negotiation, and no datacenter space needed to be found. I could just sign up and start working from deciding to write the app to it being up and running on the Internet was measured in days.
他写道：“更具颠覆性的是，开通存储只需要一张信用卡。不需要财务审批提案、不需要RFP、不需要供应商筛选流程、不需要谈判合同，也不需要找机房。我只需注册账户、开始动手写程序，从决定要做这个应用到它上线运行，整个过程只用了几天。”
After debugging and testing extensively, the end of the month rolled around and I got my visa bill. Of course, I knew abstractly, that S3 was disruptively priced. But when I saw that my bill for the entire development and test of this application was \$3.08, it just seemed wrong. Once development was complete, I was still storing all the test data in S3. The following month, I got a bill for \$0.07."
“我完成了大量调试和测试，月底我收到了Visa账单。我当然知道S3的价格非常具有颠覆性。但当我看到整个应用开发和测试只花了3.08美元时，我简直不敢相信。之后我还把测试数据留在S3里，第二个月账单是——0.07美元。”
Ben: No joke, David. Every month, I get a bill from AWS for 71 cents, and I have no idea what old project it was for. It's one of these things where it's priced so dynamically. If it was a big successful project holding a lot of data, then it would be expensive.
Ben：说真的，David，我现在每个月还会收到AWS寄来的账单，大概71美分。我完全不知道是哪个老项目留下的。AWS的定价机制非常灵活——如果是个大型成功项目、存储了大量数据，那账单自然高；但对这些被遗忘的小项目来说，根本不值一提。
They actually have pretty good margins on S3, on bandwidth, and some of these things. But because it was an abandoned project for which I do not know what the email address to login to AWS is from whatever team I was working on, I just don't care.
其实他们在S3、带宽等服务上的利润率还不错。但对于那种我连用哪个邮箱注册都记不住的废弃项目，我根本懒得管。
David: Could you imagine back in 2006, let alone even probably today, Oracle, Microsoft, IBM, HP, or you name it?
David：你能想象在2006年，甚至直到今天，Oracle、微软、IBM、惠普这些公司也这么干吗？
Ben: They all have six-, seven-, and eight-figure contracts. There's no way that they're going to invest in, hey, let's let people pay with a credit card and service this tiny little market.
Ben：他们的合同都是六位数、七位数、甚至八位数的。这些公司根本不可能说，“咱们让用户用信用卡付款吧，去服务这个微不足道的小市场。”
David: And we'll charge you \$3.08. This was unbelievably world-changing, truly world-changing. This is how Dropbox, Instagram, Airbnb, Uber, Zynga, all of these companies, get started.
David：而我们只收你3.08美元。这实在是颠覆性的，是真正改变世界的。Dropbox、Instagram、Airbnb、Uber、Zynga……这些公司就是靠这个起步的。
Ben: I remember being at all the Startup Weekends and all these hackathons, where the audience, the family members who came, the venture capitalists who came to be the judges, it was blowing the audience's mind how fast people could stand something up in 48 hours. Because suddenly, you didn't have to spend \$5 million in three months figuring out what data center you were going to put something in. You actually could just have an idea and get it out there within two days. This birth that movement.
Ben：我记得当时参加了很多Startup Weekend和各类黑客松活动。现场观众、来做评委的风险投资人，还有一些家属，他们都被震撼了——人们居然能在48小时内搭出一个项目。因为突然之间，你不需要花三个月、五百万美元来决定用哪个数据中心了。你只要有个点子，两天之内就能上线。这推动了整个创业浪潮的兴起。
David: We all lived it. Rover.com, where in all and various ways, part of next to our great friend and mentor, Greg Gottesman. He was a VC. He wasn't technical. It got built in a weekend.
David：我们都亲身经历过。就像Rover.com，那时我们和我们的朋友、导师Greg Gottesman一起参与了。他是个风投，不懂技术，但这个项目就在一个周末里被搭建出来了。
Ben: Yeah, Phil Kimmey.
Ben：对，是Phil Kimmey。
David: Phil, our buddy, built it. Amazon, of course, embraces this. In fall of 2007, they start the AWS Startup Challenge. They host it first in September 2007. They didn't win, but do you know who was part, a contestant in that very first AWS Startup Challenge?
David：是我们的朋友Phil做的。亚马逊当然非常拥抱这种趋势。他们在2007年秋天发起了“ AWS Startup Challenge”，第一次是在2007年9月举行。他们没有获胜，但你知道谁参加了那一届比赛吗？
Ben: Is it Teach Street? Is it going to be some Amazon inside baseball?
Ben：是Teach Street吗？还是和亚马逊有关的内幕？
David: Oh, even better. Justin.tv.
David：更厉害，是Justin.tv。
Ben: No way.
Ben：不会吧！
David: Which, of course, would pivot into Twitch.
David：当然，后来它转型成了Twitch。
Ben: Which, Amazon would then buy.
Ben：而Twitch最终被亚马逊收购了。
David: Of course, Amazon would then buy.
David：对，最终还是亚马逊买下了它。
Ben: Wow, for the better part of a billion dollars, right?
Ben：哇，差不多花了十亿美元吧？
David: Yup. I don't have a good sense of how Twitch is doing now. I assume Amazon got a good deal on that almost no matter what. We got to find the right way to revisit that.
David：对。我现在不太确定Twitch的现状如何，但我想无论如何，亚马逊应该都算是捡到了便宜。我们找机会好好回顾一下这段故事吧。
Ben: For sure, but that is a great use case. Justin.tv early, they were using a lot of bandwidth to stream video. They were using a lot of S3 to store. It was a great use case. Man, did Amazon embrace this thing. This is probably one of the biggest keys to success or playbook themes for why AWS became successful.
Ben：毫无疑问，这是一个很好的使用场景。Justin.tv早期使用大量带宽来进行视频直播，也用很多S3来存储数据。这是一个完美的用例。亚马逊真的非常拥抱这件事。这或许是AWS成功的最大关键之一，也是其成功路线图中的核心要素。
They realized how perfect this was for startups, they realized how hard it would be for large enterprises to just wholesale move over. They realized that was not going to be the first beachhead market. But for startups who were building something from scratch, who could go on to become \$50+ billion companies, my God, let's get them on AWS.
他们意识到这对初创公司来说是多么完美，同时也意识到大型企业要整体迁移上云会有多困难。他们知道，那不会是第一个切入市场。但对于那些从零开始构建、最终可能成长为500亿美元以上市值公司的初创企业，天啊，我们一定要让他们使用AWS。
The blitz was so impressive. I remember the first time I met Dave Chappelle who was doing developer evangelism for AWS early with Jeff Barr and so many other folks there. It was just a breath of fresh air, where every happy hour you went to, there were AWS people who were giving you tons of free credits, who were helping introduce you to other people for your startup.
这场推广攻势令人印象深刻。我记得第一次见到Dave Chappelle的时候，他当时和Jeff Barr及AWS的其他人一起做开发者推广。那真是一股清流——每次参加社交活动，总能遇到AWS的人，他们会送你大量的免费额度，还会帮你介绍其他对你创业有帮助的人。
They all thought about themselves as active participants in the startup community. It just became this obvious default that you would build on AWS, because it felt so ingrained with how you make startups. You start an AWS account for the thing that you're going to build.
他们都把自己当作创业社区的积极参与者。渐渐地，用AWS构建项目就成了一种“默认选项”，因为这已经深深融入了创业的方式中。你要启动一个项目，第一步就是开一个AWS账号。
There's a famous Andy Jassy refrain that you hear at basically every re\:Invent where he talks about first, there were the enterprise cloud doubters who said, oh, maybe this is good for startups, but it's no good for line of business applications. It's no good for mission-critical applications. And, oh, maybe it'll be good for my test environment or my dev environment, but I won't be able to run enterprise-grade stuff there.
Andy Jassy有一句在每年re\:Invent大会上都会重复说的话，那就是：起初，有很多企业对云持怀疑态度，他们说，“哦，这个可能适合初创公司，但不适合企业级应用，也无法承载关键任务。”他们说，“也许可以用来做测试或开发环境，但我们不会把真正的企业应用部署在AWS上。”
David: I think his line is, at first, it was that nobody thought you could run a real application. It was only what James was building, like a personal test project. Then it was like, oh, well, startups can run in AWS, but real enterprises won't do that. Then it was like, well, as a real enterprise, we can run non-differentiated, non-mission critical stuff in AWS, but we're not going to put our mission critical stuff in AWS. That's going to be on-prem. Then it was like, oh, my God, take my money.
David：我记得他的说法是，一开始没人相信你能在AWS上运行真正的应用，只能拿来做像James那样的个人测试项目。后来人们说，嗯，初创公司可以在AWS上运行，但真正的企业不会。再后来，他们说，好吧，作为一家企业，我们可以把一些非关键、非差异化的系统放在AWS上，但关键任务的系统必须留在本地部署。最后，他们终于说，“天哪，快拿走我的钱。”
Ben: Right. I think there's this interesting, obvious first beachhead of customers that are at startups. When you think about the enterprise adoption, and how eventually, now, your bank's application is on AWS, and everything was moving to the cloud or \$120 billion a year of revenue has already moved to the cloud of, at least, Microsoft, Amazon, or Google. There are these three prepositions of the cloud.
Ben：对。AWS的第一个切入点非常清晰——就是初创企业。但当你再看企业端的采用情况，直到今天，你的银行应用都已经运行在AWS上了。所有东西都在向云迁移，每年至少有1200亿美元的营收已经流向了云市场，被微软、亚马逊、谷歌三家瓜分。云的演进中，其实可以归纳出三个“前置动作”（prepositions）。
There are people building on the cloud, which, to me, that's lift and shift. That's really like a phrase that the cloud industry uses for, hey, you are running some local databases, you had some local storage, you basically had your data center, and you just want to lift that up, shift it over, and drop it in Amazon's datacenter. You're not going to take advantage of any cool stuff, you're just going to now run your stuff in Amazon.
有一种是“构建在云上”，对我来说，这就是所谓的“搬迁上云”（lift and shift）。这是云计算行业的术语，意思是你原本在本地有数据库、有存储、有数据中心，现在只是把它们整体“搬起来、移动过去、丢进亚马逊的数据中心”。你并不会利用云的任何高级功能，你只是把原来的系统换了个地方运行而已。
The benefit that you get out of that is, you only pay for what you use. You don't have to pay the big upfront costs. And you don't have to maintain it yourself. But otherwise, exactly the same thing.
这么做的好处是你按使用量付费，不需要一次性付出大量前期投入，也不需要自己维护。但除此之外，和原来的系统没什么区别。
David: Jassy, actually, at the first re\:Invent in 2012, as part of his presentation, he has a great slide on this where he talks about the six reasons AWS wins versus traditional infrastructure for enterprises. It's exactly what he said. (1) You're trading ae in CapEx for OpEx, which you can take all that expense in every income statement every year as opposed to capitalizing it. (2) You're getting lower OpEx than you could on your own. Thanks to AWS's economies of scale.
David：Jassy在2012年第一次re\:Invent大会上展示了一张很棒的幻灯片，总结了AWS在企业市场上相较于传统基础设施取胜的六个理由。他说得非常清楚。（1）你用运营支出（OpEx）取代了资本支出（CapEx），这意味着你可以每年把这些花费计入损益表，而不是作为资本化成本处理。（2）你获得的运营成本会比自己搭建更低，这是由于AWS的规模经济带来的好处。
Ben: They're getting better deals on their servers, so they're passing those along to you.
Ben：他们拿到的服务器价格更便宜，然后把这些节省转嫁给你。
David: Yup. (3) You don't have to guess on infrastructure capacity ahead of time. AWS is elastic. As you need more, it scales up. As you need less, it scales down.
David：对的。（3）你不需要提前猜测需要多少基础设施容量。AWS是弹性的，你需要更多资源时它会自动扩展，需要更少时它就收缩。
And that’s actually, (4) It can scale down. When projects don't work, you're not stuck with legacy leftover infrastructure from things that don't work.
而且，（4）它可以“缩下来”。当项目失败时，你不会被遗留的基础设施拖住脚步，不用担心处理那些用不上的旧硬件。
(5) Engineers can focus on writing code, not installing infrastructure. Focus on what makes your beer taste better.
（5）工程师可以专注于写代码，而不是搭建和维护基础设施。专注于真正能让你的“啤酒更好喝”的事。
And then, (6) You're instantly global on AWS, versus when you run your own on-prem datacenters, you're like, wherever your data centers are.
（6）在AWS上，你可以立即拥有全球部署能力，而不是像本地数据中心那样受限于你自己的数据中心所在地。
Ben: Which sounds nice. It's not quite true. It's not one global availability zone. Actually, interesting point, that was the original premise. They thought they were going to abstract that away, and you were going to imagine a global S3 data center.
Ben：听起来很好，但也不完全准确。AWS并不是一个全球统一的可用区。其实，最初他们是这么设想的。他们本来想把这一层抽象掉，让你以为S3就是一个全球统一的数据中心。
When you deployed it, it just went to all of the datacenters, and then they quickly realized, we're going to have so much traffic from so many customers that we're going to consume WAN. We're going to consume the Internet's bandwidth replicating unnecessarily. There is, you do not run globally by default in every single. Anyway, yes.
你部署内容时，它会自动扩展到所有数据中心。但他们很快意识到，这样做会因为太多客户产生的数据传输而耗尽广域网带宽——会无谓地消耗整个互联网的带宽。所以默认情况下，你的服务并不会在所有地方全球同步部署。总之，确实如此。
There's this step two, which is building in the cloud. That's taking advantage of using things like the relational database service, that RDS, the very early thing that they launched, which is, hey, this isn't just your exact same code and your exact same infrastructure, but in our data center and build differently, you're actually taking advantage of a cloud-native service. Then there's building for the cloud, and that's the future. Those are things like Lambda and DynamoDB.
第二步，是“构建于云中”（building in the cloud）。这意味着开始利用诸如RDS这样的服务——RDS是AWS很早期就推出的关系型数据库服务。它不只是让你把原来的代码和基础设施搬到AWS上，而是引导你使用真正“云原生”的服务。而下一步则是“为云而构建”（building for the cloud），这才是未来，比如Lambda和DynamoDB这类服务。
If you think about Lamda, for folks who have not done this or heard of the serverless movement, it's this idea that you don't even need to reserve an EC2 instance or deploy code to it. You just write your code and then when you want to call it, a thing just spins up for a few milliseconds, runs your code, and spins down. You were never aware of its IP address or where in the world it was. You just know that your code executed.
以Lambda为例，如果你还没接触过“无服务器架构”（serverless），它的理念是你甚至不需要预留EC2实例或将代码部署到某台服务器上。你只需写好代码，当你调用它时，AWS会为你临时启动一个运行环境，用几毫秒运行完你的代码，然后就释放资源。你完全不需要知道它的IP地址，也不知道它运行在哪个国家，只知道代码成功运行了。
That's really like building for the cloud. You're completely architecting your application differently to take advantage of this very different world of computing the cloud offers.
这才是真正的“为云而构建”。你会以全然不同的架构来设计应用，以真正发挥云计算带来的全新计算范式和资源分配能力。
David: If we rewind the origin stories number two and three of the big monolith software problem, all the engineers and product teams in Amazon, and every other internet company were spending all their time focused on not making the beer tastes better, undifferentiated, heavy IT lifting, in the beginning, really what happened is probably development teams in those days were spending like 70% of their time on infrastructure and setup and 30% of their time on software development.
David：如果我们回顾一下第二和第三版本的AWS起源故事，也就是那个庞大的单体软件问题，当时Amazon和其他所有互联网公司的工程师和产品团队都把时间花在那些“并不会让啤酒更好喝”的工作上，也就是那些没有差异化、重复繁重的IT任务上。实际上，那时的开发团队大概有70%的时间都花在基础设施搭建和配置上，只有30%的时间是真正在写代码、做开发。
And then AWS shifted it to, okay, spend 70% of your time on software development and 30% of your time on worrying about our APIs and your infrastructure. This for the cloud, Lambda, everything is like, that's taking it down to zero.
然后AWS把这个比例彻底颠倒了：开发团队可以把70%的时间用在软件开发上，只有30%的时间用来处理API和基础设施问题。而如果进一步用上云原生架构、Lambda这些服务，那基础设施上的精力投入几乎可以降到零。
Ben: That's the goal, at least. I think all this stuff sounds better in principle than it actually ends up in practice. But yeah, that's the idea.
Ben：至少这是目标啦。我觉得这些东西在理论上听起来比实际操作中要美好得多，但确实，这是整个设想的方向。
AWS, in its earliest days, let's call it the first couple of years, it was really startup focused. New applications from whole cloth that want to use our Infrastructure as a Service, primitive building blocks.
AWS在最初的几年确实是专注在初创公司上的。那些从零开始的新应用程序会直接采用AWS的基础设施服务，也就是这些最基本的构建模块。
They very quickly realized, if we're doing Infrastructure as a Service, it also does enable this lift and shift thing. As long as we work like hell to satisfy the compliance, requirements, availability requirements, uptime, and all this stuff, replication requirements of enterprises...
他们很快意识到，如果我们提供的是基础设施即服务（IaaS），那么也自然支持“迁移上云”（lift and shift）这种方式。只要我们拼命努力去满足企业客户的合规性要求、可用性要求、正常运行时间，以及数据冗余复制等这些企业级需求……
David: And SOC 2 audited with Vanta.
David：还有通过像Vanta这样的平台完成SOC 2审计。
David: There you go. Perfect. Very quickly, AWS could serve these two markets of startups and the lift and shift enterprise. Another way you could have designed this is instead of doing this Infrastructure as a Service and these primitives, you could say, let's think about the far future, the Lambdas of the world. We're imagining now in 2006, why don't we just build that stuff to start? Let's change the development paradigm. Let's build the platform of the future, that platform will live in the cloud. That platform is not Windows of the past or the App Store of the current day, where it was just coming. That platform of the cloud, why don't we start writing the brand new paradigm today?
David：没错，完美。因此AWS很快就能同时服务这两个市场——初创公司，以及“迁移上云”的企业客户。其实，也可以有另一种思路：与其从基础设施和底层构件开始，为什么不一开始就去构建未来呢？比如Lambda这类代表未来的东西。我们设想现在是2006年，为什么不直接构建出那个新的开发范式呢？我们要构建的是未来的平台，它将完全运行在云上。这不是过去的Windows，也不是刚刚兴起的App Store，而是云上的平台。为什么不直接从今天就开始写出那个新的范式？
There are a couple other big tech companies that took that approach, at first, that were completely wrong. The unfortunate thing for Microsoft and for Google, who really started at this Platform as a Service layer was, you basically didn't get the startups because you didn't have a mature platform yet that people were excited to build on and understood how to build for. But you also didn't get the enterprises because there was no ability to lift and shift. If you were creating a Platform as a Service in the late 2000s, you're really a decade early, and you're building for a market that doesn't yet exist.
当时还有几家大科技公司也是走这条路线的，但结论是他们走错了。微软和谷歌的教训就在于，他们一开始就从平台即服务（PaaS）层起步，可惜这太超前了。对初创公司来说，你的平台还不够成熟，不知道怎么构建、也不兴奋；对企业客户来说，你又没有支持迁移上云的能力。如果你在2000年代末期就开始做PaaS，其实你是早了整整十年——那个市场当时还根本没诞生。
David: Okay, let's talk about what happens, because Amazon ran the table on maybe the most important market of all time.
David：好，那我们来聊聊后续发生的事，因为Amazon几乎主宰了这个可能是有史以来最重要的市场。
Ben: For the first five years with nobody competing with them.
Ben：头五年几乎没有人能和他们竞争。
David: It's incredible. 2006 is when the first services launched. 2007–2008, that's when the startups are getting started—Airbnb, Uber, Instagram and the like. They're becoming big, but they're not yet at the scale that they are today. 2009, Netflix becomes a customer.
David：这真是令人难以置信。2006年是AWS推出首批服务的年份。到了2007–2008年，一批初创公司像Airbnb、Uber、Instagram等刚刚起步，正在成长壮大，但还远未达到今天的规模。而在2009年，Netflix成了AWS的客户。
Ben: How crazy is this? They had already built their own, in the last three years, basically cloud internally in order to stream video, which was originally, I think, stream through Silverlight. They had this big partnership with Microsoft.
Ben：这太疯狂了。他们在前几年已经基本上构建了自己的内部“云”来实现视频流服务，当时应该是通过Silverlight进行视频播放的。他们和微软有过一个大型合作。
David: That's right. Oh, my God. That was so terrible.
David：没错。天啊，那体验真是糟糕透了。
Ben: Yes. I think you had to use IE to view it. It was bad. They had just invested a bunch and then did an about face and said, oh, we were wrong. Actually, we're going to use AWS instead.
Ben：对，好像你必须用IE浏览器才能看。他们才刚刚花了一大笔钱做了那个系统，结果立刻来了个大转弯，说我们错了，实际上我们决定改用AWS。
David: We're moving all of it to AWS. I believe Netflix is still to this day, I think, 100% on AWS.
David：我们把全部系统迁移到AWS上。我记得Netflix到今天应该还是100%运行在AWS上的。
Ben: I don't know about 100%, but yes, they're still an enormous customer. Reed Hastings was actually the very first guest interviewed on stage at the first re\:Invent in 2012.
Ben：我不确定是不是100%，但他们确实仍然是一个非常重要的客户。Reed Hastings其实就是2012年第一届re\:Invent大会上被访谈的第一位嘉宾。
David: I think in that interview, if it wasn't that one, it's another one around that time, he talks about people say, Reed, you compete with amazon.com, aren't you worried about being on AWS? And he's like, no. I'm not worried at all about being on AWS. It is legitimately the smart infrastructure decision for us to make.
David：我记得在那次访谈里，或者是那段时间的另一场访谈中，他说，有人问他：Reed，你不是和amazon.com是竞争对手吗，你不担心使用AWS吗？而他回答说：完全不担心。使用AWS是我们在基础设施方面做出的非常明智的选择。
Ben: That was such a feather in Amazon's cap. They've had two big feathers in their cap, there's that one and the CIA one. It's secure enough for the CIA to use, so it should be secure enough for you, and that was a few years later.
Ben：这对Amazon来说是一个巨大的荣耀。他们有两个特别值得炫耀的案例：一个是Netflix，另一个是CIA。你看，连CIA都敢用AWS，那对你来说肯定也够安全了——那个案例发生在几年之后。
The Netflix one, a lot of people were afraid to use AWS early on because they felt like they didn't want to do business with Amazon if they were a retailer, or they didn't want to do business with Amazon if they were in video, or in any of these things that Amazon was competing on. Reed getting up on stage and saying this matter of factly and so forcefully was him saying, you can trust that AWS is different than Amazon.
Netflix的案例特别关键。很多人在早期不愿使用AWS，是因为他们觉得如果自己是零售商、视频公司或任何跟Amazon有直接竞争关系的行业，就不应该跟Amazon做生意。但Reed走上舞台，以这么直接而坚定的方式表态，等于是告诉大家：“你可以放心，AWS和Amazon.com是不同的东西。”
David: Okay. Why is Reed and Netflix making this decision? Why then do a bunch of other customers do this? Microsoft, let's put Google to the side for a minute, but IBM, Oracle, all these legacy technology companies, why are they asleep at the wheel here? It's the disruptive pricing model.
David：那么，Reed和Netflix为什么要做这个决定？为什么后来越来越多客户也纷纷选择AWS？我们先把Google放在一边，像微软、IBM、Oracle这些传统科技巨头，为什么完全没有意识到这一变革？这其实就是颠覆性的定价模式的力量。
Ben: Let's not loop them together, because I actually think it's worth analyzing each company failed to claim this opportunity for unique reasons.
Ben：我们不要一概而论，因为每家公司错失这次机会其实都有它独特的原因，这点很值得分别分析。
The first couple, it's worth analyzing. I think what you're pointing out as these old server companies. The IBMs and Oracle on the database side, that made these ridiculous gross margins, and they sold you this complete proprietary solution.
首先可以分析几家传统服务器公司。就像你说的那些老牌服务器商，比如IBM和做数据库的Oracle，他们当时赚的是非常夸张的毛利率，而且卖给你的全是封闭的专有解决方案。
David: Yeah, 80% gross margins.
David：是的，毛利率高达80%。
Ben: Totally. They would sell that to you. They would install it in your data center. Eventually, they would hand wave and call something cloud.
Ben：没错。他们就把这些软件卖给你，然后安装在你的数据中心里。后来他们随便糊弄一下，就把某些东西叫做“云”。
David: Private cloud, private cloud.
David：所谓“私有云”，“私有云”。
Ben: They might do it in their datacenter or they might do it in yours, but it's effectively the same thing. It's sold on a license basis that comes with auditing. Amazon has this ability to literally meter your usage and then charge you exactly what you need to be charged. Whereas this old model of buying a bunch of Oracle licenses and deploying them on the servers in your datacenter, you just get these audits every once in a while.
Ben：他们可能是在自己的数据中心部署，也可能是在你的，但本质上没区别。还是按许可证销售，并带有审计机制。而Amazon的做法是能够精准计量你的使用量，并据此收费。相反，在过去你购买一堆Oracle许可证，在你自己的服务器上部署，结果就是不时有人来审计你。
Okay, cool. We sold you a license and you bought this many licenses, we'll show up and make sure that you aren't misusing this thing. They weren't going to change that business model. It was a license to print money.
好了，我们卖给你许可证，你买了这么多，我们来确认你没有滥用。他们才不会改变这种商业模式呢。那简直就是印钞机。
David: Amazon targeted gross margins and operating margins for AWS in the 20%–40% range.
David：Amazon为AWS设定的目标毛利率和运营利润率区间是20%到40%。
Ben: Which felt like a 10X and a 20X for them, but was unattractive to the traditional.
Ben：这对Amazon来说是目前利润的10倍到20倍，听起来很惊人，但对传统厂商却没有吸引力。
David: Right. This is the perspective. Amazon.com is operating on a 2% operating margin basis. For Amazon, they're like, oh shoot, we get 10X–20X. Our margin basis with this new business, awesome, but that's still less than half of the margin that the old school guys are getting.
David：没错，这就看你从哪个角度看。Amazon.com的运营利润率只有2%，所以他们觉得，“哇，这新业务有10–20倍的利润率，太棒了！”但对那些老牌公司来说，这还不到他们利润率的一半。
Ben: The old school guys are certainly fat and happy on their operations. Whereas Amazon knows how to run everything they've ever run as this unbelievable lean machine, because they're so COGS-sensitive on everything.
Ben：那些老公司当然运作得又肥又满意。而Amazon则习惯于把一切都运转得极其精简，因为他们对成本结构（COGS）非常敏感。
David: Here's another thing, though. You mentioned, call it the Oracle's or the IBM's whoever, they'd come install this software on computers for you or in their data centers, call it private cloud or whatever. They'd install Oracle database version 19. Two years later, you're paying your maintenance costs, you're going to pay an upgrade cost to go to Oracle database version 20, and then you're going to go a couple of years later to version 21, and you're going to pay a bunch of money every time you migrate.
David：不过，还有一点你提到很重要，比如Oracle、IBM这些公司，他们来给你安装数据库软件，比如Oracle数据库19版。两年后你付维护费，还要付升级费升级到20版，再过几年再升级到21版。每次升级迁移，你都要支付一大笔钱。
Ben: Right. Why would you give up this annuity that you have?
Ben：对啊，那你干嘛要放弃这笔稳定的“年金收入”？
David: Right. Cloud infrastructure, it's always up to date. There is no version. Whatever you're using, you're using the latest stuff, because it's always. Then even more than that, Amazon gets to constantly iterate versus doing these Windows XP every four years, we're going to ship a big update. No, it's just constantly changing.
David：没错。而云基础设施永远是最新版本。没有所谓的版本号。你用的就是最新的，因为系统一直在更新。而且Amazon还能不断迭代，不像Windows XP那样每隔四年发布一次大更新。AWS是在持续进化的。
Ben: Yup. Okay, that's super old guard, the IBM's and Oracle's, which is very funny. When you watch all these keynotes, I wonder if anyone's ever watched them all mainline like I did, because I have this unique perspective seeing them also close to each other.
Ben：是的，说的就是那些老牌势力，比如IBM和Oracle，这真的很有趣。当你看所有这些发布会的主旨演讲时——我不确定是否有人像我一样连着看完所有的演讲——因为我从一个非常独特的视角看它们，能清楚对比每年的变化。
They used to, onstage, refer to IBM and Oracle in a tongue in cheek way. They would refer to like a New York company and it would be like IBM logo, but it would say like New York company. Oracle, they would go as far as to like a San Francisco company, and then they might make a reference to a super yacht, sailing, or something to really drive the point home.
他们以前在舞台上总是用揶揄的方式提到IBM和Oracle。他们会说“纽约的一家公司”，然后用IBM的标志却配上“New York company”字样。Oracle呢，他们会说“旧金山的一家公司”，甚至还会暗示超级游艇、航海什么的，来讽刺他们的奢华与旧思维。
Around 2016–2017, they totally did an about face, and they just start directly attacking them. They start directly attacking Microsoft, too, because I think Microsoft went from, in the early days, someone where Amazon looked at them more as a partner, like, we're happy to run Microsoft stuff on your AWS instances. Now that Azure has actually been an extremely viable competitor and made a big, big comeback...
到了2016–2017年左右，他们彻底转变了风格，开始直接攻击这些公司。他们也开始直接攻击微软，因为在早期，Amazon还把微软视作某种合作伙伴，像是“我们很乐意在AWS上运行微软的软件”。但现在Azure已经成为非常有力的竞争对手，卷土重来了……
David: They're the best competitor to AWS by far.
David：他们无疑是AWS目前最强的竞争对手。
Ben: Amazon now loves attacking SQL server licenses and stuff like that that Microsoft, of course, comes in and audits just like the old guard for. Let's look at Microsoft, though. Let's think back to the mid-2000s, because this really should have been their business to take. They should have figured this out.
Ben：现在Amazon非常喜欢攻击SQL Server许可费这一类问题，而微软当然也像那些老牌公司一样会来审计。我们来看看微软吧，回到2000年代中期说起——说实话，这原本应该是他们的市场，他们本该最早意识到这个机会的。
There are essentially two problems going on at Microsoft. One, the Windows group just had too much power. Between them, the Windows Server people, and the SQL Server people, the goal of those groups was to get customers to do more with this idea that people thought was going to be big for a while.
微软当时基本存在两个大问题。第一，Windows部门权力太大。Windows Server团队、SQL Server团队等，他们的目标是推动客户更深入使用当时看起来很有前景的一种理念。
PCs taking over the datacenter, then PC Operating Systems becoming the data center operating system. Really, the goal was sell more Windows Server licenses, and that was a great business. Anything that looked too much like that within Microsoft got gobbled up in an internal power struggle, because it could look like it would cannibalize that thing.
那理念是：让PC主导数据中心，再进一步让PC操作系统变成数据中心的操作系统。他们真正的目标是卖出更多的Windows Server许可证——这可是块肥肉。所以公司内部任何看起来会跟这块业务重叠的项目，都会在权力斗争中被吞掉，因为看起来像是会蚕食主业务的存在。
David: This was probably happening when you were there, right?
David：这些事情发生的时候你应该还在微软，对吧？
Ben: Yes. It was sort of over by the time I was there in 2012 is when I arrived. They did eventually realize that they had to make a big bet on Azure and totally separate from Windows Server. We should give Ballmer credit because he did see this.
Ben：是的。等我2012年到微软的时候，这场斗争基本上已经结束了。他们最终意识到，必须在Azure上下注，而且要完全把它从Windows Server体系中剥离出来。我们得给Ballmer一点功劳，因为他确实看到了这个趋势。
They replaced the leader of that organization at the time of Windows Server and tools business with Satya, who would eventually, of course, become CEO, and then really doubled down on the cloud strategy. They realized, okay, Azure needs to be a thing that's kept separate, has CEO sponsorship, and can escape the Windows Server thing.
当时，他们把掌管Windows Server和开发工具业务的领导者换成了Satya（纳德拉），他后来当然也成了CEO。之后他们真正地加倍投入到了云战略中。他们认识到Azure必须作为一个独立业务来运营，要有CEO级别的支持，必须摆脱掉Windows Server的束缚。
Their second problem is what we were talking about earlier. They launched this thing called Azure Cloud Services, which they've now basically deprecated, which was a Platform as a Service approach. Microsoft had the golden goose. They had all the IT relationships.
他们的第二个问题就是我们刚才提到的。他们推出了一个叫Azure Cloud Services的东西（现在基本上已经废弃了），那是一个平台即服务（PaaS）的做法。微软其实握有金鹅——他们拥有整个IT行业的客户关系和渠道。
What they should have done is gone to everyone that was using Windows Server and say, great news, we have primitives in a datacenter that you can lift and shift to much like how Azure works today. You can trust us, you already pay us. We'll make this a part of your enterprise agreement, but Microsoft got clever.
他们本来应该做的是，直接去找所有使用Windows Server的客户，说：“好消息！我们现在在数据中心里有一些基础模块，你可以直接把你们的东西迁过去，就像现在的Azure那样运行。”客户已经信任微软，已经给他们付钱了，他们本可以把这项服务直接整合进企业协议中。但微软当时“聪明”了一下。
They thought, you know what? Win32 runtime, the .NET platform, we’re a great platform company.
他们当时想的是：“你知道吗？我们有Win32运行时，有.NET平台，我们可是世界级的平台公司啊。”
Developers want to build for the things that we make, so let's make the next generation set of APIs and platforms for building great cloud applications.
“开发者肯定会愿意基于我们提供的平台来开发产品，所以我们应该打造新一代的API和平台，用来构建出色的云端应用。”
They just totally did not recognize the magical thing they had in front of them, which was all the customers and all the distribution, who over the next five years, would slowly dribble out and start their new stuff on AWS while Microsoft was still figuring out its strategy.
他们完全没有意识到自己手里握着一件多么神奇的武器——所有的客户和所有的渠道网络。而在接下来的五年里，这些客户一个个地流失掉，转而在AWS上开始新项目，而微软还在摸索他们的策略。
They got caught in that middle of people building brand new apps, didn't know how to build for their platforms, and they didn't want the lock in. That's still a big thing in cloud, oh, don't get locked in, you want to be multi cloud. They didn't make it easy for their existing customers to lift and shift.
微软卡在了一个不上不下的位置——新应用开发者不知道如何为他们的平台开发，而且也不想被“锁定”，这在云计算领域依然是个大问题。大家都说要避免被锁定，保持多云策略。微软也没有为现有客户提供一个便捷的“lift and shift”（迁移）路径。
Microsoft, while they're in a great place now and have figured out an interesting strategy, and we can talk about the Baron bowl later, they just had five years of watching pitches go by.
虽然微软现在已经站稳了脚跟，并找到了一个不错的战略（我们之后可以聊聊“Baron bowl”），但他们前五年基本就是眼睁睁看着好机会一个接一个错过。
David: Yeah. Oh, it was such a whiff. Okay, we talked about Oracle. I want to come back to Oracle in a minute. We talked about Microsoft. What about Google?
David：是啊，那真是错失良机。好，我们讲过了Oracle，等下我还想再聊聊它。我们也聊了微软。那么谷歌呢？
Ben: Google is the third place. Amazon's got 35%, maybe 40%. Microsoft's got 20%–22%. Google is somewhere around 10%.
Ben：谷歌排在第三。亚马逊现在占了35%，甚至可能到40%。微软大概在20%–22%左右。而谷歌大概只有10%左右的份额。
David: Microsoft having 22%, that's an enormous win.
David：微软能拿下22%，那已经算是巨大胜利了。
Ben: Totally. Here's my take on Google. They accidentally became a business. They launched as a project, and then they figured out this business that became unbelievably cash-generative, immediately.
Ben：完全同意。我对Google的看法是，它其实是一不小心变成了一家生意的公司。他们一开始只是做了个项目，后来才意识到这个项目可以变成一门立即开始疯狂赚钱的生意。
The nature of their business being search and feeding all the data directly and to make the results better, is that they instantly became a consumer-sponsored monopoly. Totally legally done competitions, just a click away, but they're the best experience. They just have these unbelievable reinforcing effects of becoming a monopoly.
他们的业务本质是搜索——通过直接获取所有数据来优化结果。正因为如此，他们一下子就变成了一个由消费者驱动的垄断者。这种垄断完全是合法竞争的结果，竞争对手只需点击一次就能换，但谷歌始终提供最好的体验。他们拥有一种不可思议的自我强化机制，从而建立了垄断地位。
They're a super high gross margin monopoly in the biggest market in the world, which is people wanting to use the Internet, and they're the front door to the Internet. Their entire existence, it's not that it's been easy, because it's been a computer science challenge.
他们是在世界上最大的市场中建立起的一个超高毛利率的垄断者——这个市场就是人们想要上网的需求。而谷歌就是互联网的入口。他们整个存在的过程并不轻松，因为它确实是一个计算机科学上的挑战。
David: It's been very academic.
David：这也让它变得很学术导向。
Ben: They've never had to go into a hard business. I don't know what Google's advertising margins are, but that business probably runs at, I guess it depends if you put sales above the line or below the line, but 80% gross margins. A 30% gross margin business is not particularly attractive to them, nor are they good at sales. I know they're getting better.
Ben：他们从来没有真正涉足过艰苦的行业。我不知道谷歌广告的具体毛利率是多少，但我猜大概在80%左右（当然这也取决于你把销售费用算在营收上方还是下方）。而一个毛利率只有30%的业务对他们来说根本没吸引力，而且他们也不擅长销售。我知道他们现在在变好。
The narrative at the time was they made this G Suite thing, which at the time was called Google Apps, but no one would buy it. They ended up giving basically all of it away for free to consumers forever. Google Docs, Gmail, and everything. It was the best thing to use, and they couldn't figure out any way to sell it to enterprises.
当时的故事是，他们做了个叫G Suite的产品（当时叫Google Apps），但没人买单。最后他们基本上把它全都免费送给了消费者，比如Google Docs、Gmail等。这些服务非常好用，但他们完全不知道怎么把它卖给企业用户。
They didn't have the competency of enterprise sales the way that Microsoft did. They didn't have the ability like Amazon to operate in these really hard businesses, eeking out every last dollar. It just looked unattractive. Meanwhile, they actually had the best technology for it.
他们不像微软那样拥有企业销售能力，也不像亚马逊那样能在极度艰难的行业中精打细算、榨取每一分钱。这门生意对他们来说根本没有吸引力。可与此同时，他们其实拥有最先进的技术来做这件事。
They actually operated these big datacenters and this really novel way of networking all the computers together in order to pull off search. They were inventing machine learning before machine learning. A huge value prop of the cloud now is all your data is in the cloud.
他们运营着全球范围内的大型数据中心，还有一整套独特的新式网络架构，把所有的计算机连接起来以实现搜索功能。他们在“机器学习”这个词流行起来之前就已经在做这件事了。如今云计算的一个巨大卖点就是——你的所有数据都在云端。
That way, you can use a bunch of stuff that Google invented, TensorFlow, Kubernetes, to run your stuff in the cloud. This also was theirs to win, but they didn't have the sales and marketing muscle. I don't think they have the iron gut that Amazon had to go do something grinded out and hard.
这样你就能用谷歌自己发明的一堆工具，比如TensorFlow、Kubernetes，把业务运行在云上。这块市场本来也是他们可以拿下的，但他们缺乏销售和市场能力。我觉得他们也缺少像亚马逊那样“死磕到底”的铁胆精神，去做那些真正艰难的事。
David: I think they also made the mistake that you're originally talking about. I thought you were talking about Google, and then you said it was Microsoft, too, of building too far in the future. I think Google made that mistake, too.
David：我认为他们也犯了你刚才提到的那个错误。我本来以为你是在说谷歌，结果你说那是微软——就是“走得太远、太超前”。我觉得谷歌也犯了这个错误。
Ben: Yup, that's totally true. The first foray was Google App Engine, which was in no way Infrastructure as a Service. It was not primitives. I think you can write in Python, or Java. It was a specific API surface for GAE, and you can make app engine apps. It was all abstracted away from you.
Ben：完全正确。谷歌最初的尝试是Google App Engine（GAE），它完全不是一种基础设施即服务（IaaS），而不是所谓的“原始组件”（primitives）。我记得你可以用Python或Java来写程序，它提供的是一套特定的API接口，用来开发App Engine应用。所有底层的东西都被抽象掉了。
It's kind of the same Microsoft thing if we're going to get really clever and build you a platform of the future. But Google, per the Steve Yegge rant, is not at all a platform company. They didn't really know how to build it. They didn't know how to sell it. They didn't know how to identify a market for it. They didn't know how to support developers in it at the time, so that fell on its face. What is GCP? Google Cloud Platform is now a very viable player in this race, but that's not where they started.
这其实和微软的思路类似：我们要变得特别聪明，给你建一个面向未来的平台。但根据Steve Yegge那篇著名的“吐槽帖”，谷歌根本不是一家平台型公司。他们不知道怎么搭建平台，不知道怎么销售，不知道怎么确定目标市场，也不知道怎么为开发者提供支持，所以这个尝试彻底失败了。如今的GCP（Google Cloud Platform）在这场竞争中已经是一个非常有力的玩家了，但这可不是他们当初的起点。
David: Yup. I want to rewind back to Oracle and talk about something. One thing that really came up in the research, from talking to people, and friends at AWS and Amazon, Amazon and AWS deserves so much credit for overcoming one of the hurdles that you just said Google had, which was Google didn't know how to do sales. Amazon didn't know how to do enterprise sales either.
David：是的。我想回头再谈谈Oracle。有件事在我们研究过程中不断被提及，特别是跟AWS和Amazon的一些朋友聊下来：亚马逊/AWS值得极大的肯定，因为他们克服了谷歌曾经面对的一大障碍——谷歌不懂销售。事实上，亚马逊一开始也不懂企业销售。
Ben: That's a great point.
Ben：这是个很棒的观点。
David: When AWS started, like we talked about, the obvious core product market fit and first set of customers was startups. They don't want enterprise sales. They just want to pay with a credit card online. Amazon didn't have to figure it out. But they then did also figure it out and served enterprises, governments, government agencies, big institutions, did the lift and shift thing, and then brought those big enterprises along.
David：AWS刚起步时，我们说过，他们显而易见的核心产品市场契合点和第一批客户就是初创公司。这些人根本不想跟你搞什么企业销售，他们只想在网上用信用卡付费。所以亚马逊当时根本不需要懂企业销售。但后来他们也确实搞明白了，还成功地服务了企业、政府、政府机构、大型机构，推动了“迁移上云”这件事，把这些传统大客户也带了进来。
Ben: I think it started with academia. Their first big contracts were with universities doing research and running effectively like their supercomputer loads on AWS.
Ben：我认为最早是从学术界开始的。他们的第一批大合同来自大学，这些学校在做研究，实质上是把超级计算负载运行在AWS上。
David: NASA was famously a customer starting in 2009.
David：NASA从2009年起就成为他们的著名客户。
Ben: That's right. They did the data streaming and then the video distribution of the Mars landing, right?
Ben：对的，当时是他们处理了火星着陆任务的数据流和视频分发，对吧？
David: That's right.
David：没错。
Ben: That was the first big thing. But working with NASA and the academic community on how do we fit in with institutions, I think, taught them some of that enterprise muscle.
Ben：那是他们做的第一个大项目。但通过和NASA以及学术界合作，去思考如何融入这些机构，我觉得这让他们学会了一些企业级客户的运作能力。
David: Those folks don't want to pay with a credit card.
David：那些机构可不是信用卡能搞定的。
Ben: Right.
本：对。
David: You got to do contracts, you got to do billing, you got to do discounts, you need a salesforce, and you need all this stuff. You need to do a big conference like re\:Invent.
大卫：你得处理合同、计费、折扣，你需要销售团队，以及所有这些配套的东西。你还得举办像 re\:Invent 这样的大型会议。
Ben: They had to have poached a bunch of Oracle salespeople, because the Amazon sales machine is a lot like the Oracle sales machine of old.
本：他们肯定挖走了不少 Oracle 的销售人员，因为亚马逊的销售体系和当年 Oracle 的销售体系非常相似。
David: Yup. Okay, let's talk about Oracle. One of the things that I think to most people—was to me before doing the research here—is vastly under-appreciated about AWS is people think about EC2, S3, Infrastructure as a Service, compute, storage, networking, and all that. True. Amazon doesn't record this. But if you Google estimates of what the most popular AWS services are, the most used ones, EC2, S3, they're juggernauts.
大卫：是的。好，我们来谈谈 Oracle。对大多数人而言——至少在我做研究之前是这样的——AWS 最被低估的一点是，人们往往只想到 EC2、S3、基础设施即服务（IaaS）、计算、存储、网络等等。没错。亚马逊并没有公开这个信息。但如果你在谷歌上搜索 AWS 最热门的服务的估计数据，使用量最大的肯定是 EC2 和 S3，它们都是巨头级别的服务。
Numbers three, four, and five are all databases. AWS is a huge database business. They have taken so much share from Oracle. While it's all related, it's infrastructure. It's also a different kind of business from infrastructure. Famously, AWS Redshift. Why is it called Redshift?
排在第三、第四和第五位的全部都是数据库服务。AWS 在数据库业务上规模庞大。他们从 Oracle 手中夺走了大量市场份额。尽管它们都是基础设施的组成部分，但数据库业务又和基础设施有所不同。AWS 有一个著名的服务叫做 Redshift。它为什么叫 Redshift 呢？
Ben: Yes. For people who don't know this, there's an official Amazon talk track and then there is a real talk track. The official Amazon talk track, do you know this one, David?
本：对。很多人可能不知道，亚马逊官方的解释和实际的说法是不一样的。亚马逊官方的解释，你知道是什么吗，大卫？
David: That it's a Doppler effect or something like that?
大卫：是不是和多普勒效应有关？
Ben: Yeah, it's physics related. I think Amazon actually used Doppler as a codename for Alexa. Of course, one of their buildings in Seattle is that. When the sound waves get bunched up or spread out, when a siren goes by, it's the Doppler effect. Redshift is the light equivalent. It's like a star moving away from you.
本：没错，跟物理学相关。我记得亚马逊实际上曾用 Doppler 作为 Alexa 的项目代号。他们在西雅图的一栋建筑就叫这个。当声音波束被压缩或拉伸时，比如救护车经过的时候，就是多普勒效应。Redshift 则是光学上的类似效应，比如恒星正在远离你的时候。
David: But there's another part of the story here.
大卫：但这个名字背后还有另外一层意思。
Ben: Shift away from Big Red.
本：就是“远离大红色”。
David: Yeah, which is Oracle. The database market is freaking huge. There are two properties of the database market that people just don't think about, but are incredible. One, the global market size for database software is \$100 billion. It is growing at 10% per year, because everything you do with computing, you need to store it in a database. You need databases, and you can't get away from them. It's big and it's growing fast. Two, database software may be the stickiest software of all time.
大卫：对，也就是 Oracle。数据库市场规模惊人，人们通常不会注意到数据库市场的两个特征，但它们非常重要：第一，全球数据库软件市场规模达到1000亿美元，每年以10%的速度增长，因为任何计算都需要存储在数据库里。你离不开数据库。这个市场非常大，并且增长迅速。第二，数据库软件可能是有史以来用户粘性最高的软件之一。
Ben: Especially at the scale that people are producing data now. It's actually worth contextualizing this a little bit. There are all these stats all the time, which are something like last year, more data was produced and stored than in the entire decade before and in the entire century before that. That's not the exact stat, but there are 11 different variants of it, which we all intuitively know because we're storing data on our phones. But when you have two things exponentially growing, it's hard to intuit the difference between those two things.
本：尤其是现在人们产生数据的规模。其实很值得对这个现象做一点背景说明。总是有一些这样的统计数据，比如去年产生和存储的数据量超过了前一个十年，甚至超过了前一个世纪的总和。虽然这可能不是准确的数字，但有十几个类似的说法，我们直觉上也能理解，因为我们自己都在手机上存数据。但当两样东西都在指数级增长时，人们很难直观理解它们之间的差别。
We know this about data. We also know this about the Internet. When you talked about dial up back in the day, then when people got their first cable or T1 Line, and meanwhile, I'm here, podcasting, and David, I'm seeing you and gigabit down directly into my computer, it's unbelievable. You think, wow, these two things have the same phenomena, except that they're actually moving at very different rates.
我们知道数据是这样增长的，互联网也是。想当年我们还在用拨号上网，后来人们第一次用上了有线或者 T1 线路。而现在我正在播客节目里看到你，大卫，千兆带宽直接进到我的电脑，简直不可思议。你会想，哇，这两个现象看起来类似，但它们的发展速度其实完全不一样。
The Internet has not gotten faster at the rate that data storage has increased. This is most illustrated in some of the AWS re\:Invent talks. They're like, hey, a lot of you want to shift to the cloud, but you have a petabyte of data or some of you have an exabyte of data in your data center. What do we do about that?
互联网的速度增长远不及数据存储的增长速度。这一点在 AWS re\:Invent 的一些演讲中体现得很明显。他们会说，嘿，你们很多人想迁移到云上，但你们的数据中心里有一个 PB，甚至有些人有一个 EB 的数据，那该怎么办？
They first released this thing that was a 100-terabyte super secure thing they would ship to your office called the Snowball. You plug it in, it would automatically get all your data and had a Kindle on it, so it would actually display a custom shipping thing. You could track it all the way back, it would arrive in the Amazon datacenter, and they would audit. It was like tamper proof, bullet proof. It's an amazing thing.
他们最开始推出的是一个容量 100TB 的超安全设备，叫做 Snowball。他们会把这个设备运送到你的办公室，你一插上电源，它就会自动把你的数据抓取进去。设备上还配了一个 Kindle 屏幕，可以显示定制的物流信息，整个运输过程可追踪。送达亚马逊的数据中心后，系统会做审计，设备本身是防篡改、防弹级别的。这是一个非常了不起的产品。
They've released a few other generations of them now. There are even some with compute on them for field applications. And then the curves kept going. The Internet kept getting a little bit faster, but our data storage kept getting a lot more significant.
后来他们又推出了几代新版本，有些甚至内置了计算能力，适合在现场使用。但增长曲线仍在继续。互联网速度稍有提升，但数据存储量则是大幅增长。
There are some stat that Andy gives on stage in a keynote in 2016–2017, somewhere in there, where they announced Amazon Snowmobile. Because all of us are sitting here on computers that have a terabyte, 2 terabytes, or 4-terabyte hard drive, you're like, 100 terabytes is not that meaningful. They're like, we will send a Snowmobile to your data center, which is a semi truck full of Snowballs, effectively, so that you can get the data to us.
2016 到 2017 年间的某场主题演讲中，Andy 公布了一个统计数据，并宣布推出 Amazon Snowmobile。我们每个人现在的电脑硬盘都有 1TB、2TB，甚至 4TB，你可能觉得 100TB 不算什么。他们说，我们会派一辆 Snowmobile 到你的数据中心，那实际上是一辆装满 Snowball 的半挂卡车，用来帮你迁移数据到我们这边。
Even with this solution, never underestimate the bandwidth of a semi truck moving down the highway. This type of solution, it can still take six months to migrate all of your data into the cloud. Whereas it would have taken you years, and years, and years, and years, I don't know the better part of a century, to actually upload it over the wide area network, over the Internet.
即便使用这种方式，也不要低估一辆在高速路上行驶的卡车所具备的“带宽”。这种迁移方式仍可能需要六个月才能把所有数据迁入云端。而如果靠广域网、靠互联网上传，那可能要花上好几年，甚至几十年，也许得花去“一个世纪的大半”。
That, I think, illustrates pretty heavily your point about once you decide to put all of your enterprise data into a database hosted in some specific vendor's cloud, there's pretty meaningful lock in there. There are very practical concerns with moving.
我觉得这充分说明了你之前提到的观点：一旦你决定将企业数据全部放进某家云厂商托管的数据库里，那你基本就被锁定了。因为数据迁移会带来非常现实的困难。
David: I can do you one better. Another example. Amazon.com used Oracle databases when it was started. Amazon.com did not finish their migration off of Oracle databases and onto AWS products until 2019.
大卫：我还可以再举一个更极端的例子。亚马逊最初就是用的 Oracle 数据库。Amazon.com 一直到 2019 年才完成从 Oracle 数据库向 AWS 自家数据库的全面迁移。
Ben: Oh, my God.
本：我的天啊。
David: Thirteen years after AWS launched.
大卫：AWS 推出后整整十三年。
Ben: That is insane.
本：这也太夸张了。
David: It took that long for Amazon itself to migrate off of Oracle.
大卫：连亚马逊自己都花了那么久才完成从 Oracle 的迁移。
Ben: Meanwhile, by that point, Amazon had eight different database solutions for other companies to use and had invented three of them. There are open-source ones they host for you, but they also created DynamoDB. They invented new database technologies that are compatible with other relational databases, but way faster, way more performant, and it's still hard to migrate within the company.
本：与此同时，到那时候亚马逊已经为其他公司提供了八种不同的数据库解决方案，其中三种是他们自己发明的。他们托管了一些开源数据库，但也自己开发了 DynamoDB。他们发明了兼容其他关系型数据库、但更快、性能更强的新型数据库技术，然而在公司内部迁移仍然是非常困难的事。
David: Amazing. You just play that forward and you're like, wow, okay, (a) there's still so much revenue that's going to shift to AWS, and (b) It's going to be so sticky. One of the most amazing stats that (again) one of our friends pointed out to us—I tweeted about this and I posted it on LinkedIn; it's just crazy—AWS today is on an \$80 billion revenue run rate. That is not the most crazy, impressive, defensible thing about AWS. If you go look in the financials in the latest 10Q from Amazon, they have to report the AWS revenue backlog.
大卫：太不可思议了。你想想未来的发展，(a) 还有大量收入会向 AWS 转移，(b) 并且粘性会极高。有个数据特别惊人，是我们朋友告诉我们的，我在推特和 LinkedIn 上都发过这个——AWS 现在的年化营收已达 800 亿美元。但这还不是 AWS 最惊人、最具护城河的一面。如果你去看亚马逊最近一份 10Q 财报，它们还必须披露 AWS 的收入积压。
Ben: Basically, a revenue that's contracted but not recognized yet.
本：基本上就是已经签订合同但还没确认入账的收入。
David: These are contracts mostly with big enterprises of revenue they've signed deals for, but that is not yet recognized. It's going to be recognized in future quarters. That backlog of committed contractual signed revenue is over \$100 billion. I don't even know what to say about that.
大卫：这些合同大多是和大型企业签订的，金额已经锁定，但收入尚未确认，将在未来几个季度陆续入账。这笔已签署但尚未确认的合同收入超过 1000 亿美元。我都不知道该怎么形容这个数字了。
Ben: There are a lot more storage and compute not on the cloud than currently in the cloud.
本：现在仍有大量的存储和计算资源还没上云，远远多于已经上云的部分。
David: Amazon could shut down all sales efforts, stop growing, literally turn off the lights in terms of new business today, and they still have \$100 billion more business that is contractually coming their way.
大卫：亚马逊现在完全可以关闭所有销售活动，停止增长，哪怕彻底“熄灯”不再拓展新业务，他们还有 1000 亿美元的合同收入排队等着入账。
Ben: It's insane.
本：简直疯狂。
David: Crazy. It's crazy.
大卫：太疯狂了，真的。
Ben: David, you mentioned, they're on a \$70, \$80 billion run rate right now?
本：大卫，你刚说他们现在的年化营收是 700 或 800 亿？
David: \$80 billion.
大卫：800 亿。
Ben: In 2014, Jeff Bezos wrote the annual memo that comes out, a letter to shareholders and said, "I believe that AWS’s market size is unconstrained." That was the point at which it was a year before they broke out AWS's financials, and I think it was a \$6 billion run rate business.
本：2014 年，杰夫·贝索斯在年度股东信中写道：“我相信 AWS 的市场规模没有上限。”那时距离 AWS 财务首次单独披露还有一年，我记得当时 AWS 的年化营收大约是 60 亿美元。
David: When the "AWS IPO," which I think Ben Thompson coined that term. It happened in 2015. That was when they reported Q1 2015 earnings. That point in time, AWS had a \$6 billion revenue run rate.
大卫：“AWS 上市”（我记得是 Ben Thompson 首创的这个说法）发生在 2015 年，也就是他们发布 2015 年第一季度财报的时候。那时 AWS 的年化营收是 60 亿美元。
Ben: It was probably like a \$4 billion business. When Bezos is like, wow, this thing, I think it's unconstrained, it's nuts. The real story here is Amazon discovered a new unregulated public utility that they could generate enormous margins on.
本：它当时可能实际业务规模只有 40 亿美元左右。而贝索斯却已经说，“哇，这个业务没上限”，这太疯狂了。真正的故事是，亚马逊发现了一个新的、未受监管的“公共事业型”产品，而且他们可以从中获得极高的利润空间。
David: Enormous for Amazon margins.
大卫：以亚马逊的标准来看，是惊人的利润。
Ben: Okay, but enormous raw dollar margins, absolute dollar margins. This is a business that they can generate billions and billions of dollars in profits by operating and is effectively a public utility. The market sizes, I think I said 120 billion earlier, but I think that's being conservative and growing at 30% per year with no end in sight of this thing, continuing to compound at that rate.
本：是的，但这里说的是绝对金额上的利润——真金白银的利润。这是一个能持续带来数十亿美元利润的业务，实际上就像一个公共事业系统。我刚才说市场规模是 1200 亿美元，但我觉得那还是保守估计，这个市场每年以 30% 的速度增长，而且目前没有任何迹象表明它的复合增长会减速。
David: I always used to think about and talk about the mega trend of our lifetimes is the Internet believing the Internet. That's the bedrock of modern life. AWS is what powers the Internet, that's true. What I've realized here, it's more than the Internet. It is anything that a computer could touch. AWS takes a tax on that, essentially.
大卫：我过去总认为我们这一代最大的趋势是“互联网相信互联网”——它是现代生活的基石。AWS 确实是互联网的底层动力。但现在我意识到，它的意义超越了互联网本身。AWS 的影响力延伸到任何被计算机触碰的事物。它基本上像是对一切计算征税。
Now to bring it full circle, anything a computer could touch is the Internet. It's one in the same these days. Jeff, it's a crazy statement, but I think he's right. Its market size is unconstrained.
归根到底，凡是计算机能接触的东西，如今也都属于互联网的一部分。杰夫这个说法虽然听起来疯狂，但我认为他说得对——这个市场确实是没有上限的。
Ben: It certainly was in 2014. I wonder if you could even make it now.
本：在 2014 年确实如此。我倒是好奇现在是不是还能这么说。
David: Yeah. Okay. The AWS IPO happens in 2015. "IPO," \$6 billion revenue run rate for AWS, 70% annual growth rate.
大卫：是的。AWS 的“IPO”发生在 2015 年，当时年化营收为 60 亿美元，年增长率达到 70%。
Ben: That's right. It was still growing like crazy then. I think now it's growing like 30%–35%. But then, it was nuts.
本：没错，那时候增长速度疯狂。我记得现在大概是 30% 到 35% 的增长，但当时简直疯了。
David: 30%–35% growth on \$80 billion is nuts. Yeah, 19.2% operating margin. When that happens, Amazon stock jumps 15%. When that earnings release comes out, it should have jumped like 500% and does over the next year or two.
大卫：800 亿美元体量还能维持 30% 到 35% 的增长，这太疯狂了。而且它的营业利润率是 19.2%。那次财报一出，亚马逊股价立刻上涨了 15%。其实它本该涨 500%，而且接下来的一两年它也确实做到了。
Ben: What an idiot I was for not buying the day that it jumped that percent. Isn't that the funniest thing about all this? You look at it and you're like, well, now the stock's expensive. No, the stock was still very cheap.
本：我当时没在股价涨那天买入，真是个傻瓜。最搞笑的就是这样吧？你看着股价想，“现在已经涨上来了，太贵了”，其实不然——它当时仍然非常便宜。
David: Very cheap, very cheap. In 2016, this is interesting, Andy Jassy was not technically the CEO of Amazon Web Services.
大卫：非常便宜，真的很便宜。2016 年，有个有趣的事，当时 Andy Jassy 在技术上还不是 AWS 的 CEO。
Ben: Senior Vice President of AWS.
本：他的头衔是 AWS 高级副总裁。
David: Yup, until 2016. In 2016, they restructured corporately. Jeff Bezos becomes CEO of the whole company, Jassy becomes CEO of AWS, and Jeff Wilke becomes CEO of everything else, Amazon retail.
大卫：没错，一直到 2016 年。2016 年他们进行了公司架构重组。杰夫·贝索斯成为整个公司的 CEO，Jassy 成为 AWS 的 CEO，而 Jeff Wilke 成为其他所有业务的 CEO，也就是亚马逊零售业务。
That year, AWS does \$12 billion in revenue, over 50% of the company's operating profits, which as we said, they do every year. \$17 billion in revenue the next year, then \$25 billion, \$45 billion in 2020. \$62 billion last year but \$80 billion run rate. Today, it's sitting on a \$100 billion backlog that's coming rain or shine. It's just freaking unbelievable.
那一年，AWS 实现了 120 亿美元收入，占据公司运营利润的 50% 以上——我们刚才也说了，几乎年年如此。第二年收入是 170 亿，再接着是 250 亿，2020 年达到了 450 亿。去年 620 亿，现在年化营收达到 800 亿美元。如今它还拥有 1000 亿美元的合同积压收入，无论晴雨都注定会到账。这简直令人难以置信。
July 5th, 2021, Jeff Bezos retires.
2021 年 7 月 5 日，杰夫·贝索斯正式退休。
Ben: Isn't it crazy, that was only a year ago? It feels longer.
本：太不可思议了，那才一年多以前？感觉好像更久了。
David: I know. Yeah, crazy. They announced it before them, but that's when it actually happened. Andy Jassy become CEO of all of Amazon. Adam Selipsky becomes CEO of Amazon Web Services. I think this was part of the most recent earnings release this most recent quarter. They did a Snowmobile operation on the International Space Station.
大卫：我也觉得，是啊，太疯了。他们是提前宣布的，但实际交接是在那时。Andy Jassy 成为了整个亚马逊的 CEO，Adam Selipsky 成为了 AWS 的 CEO。我记得这件事还出现在他们最近一季度的财报里——他们居然在国际空间站执行了一次 Snowmobile 数据迁移任务。
Ben: Oh, I didn't know that. Really?
本：哇，我都不知道，真的？
David: Yeah. I don't know if they worked with SpaceX or maybe Blue Origin. They sent some Snowballs up to the space station, and they lifted and shifted out of the space station. We've said it before, but AWS has about a 39% market share of the cloud, Azure, 21%, Alibaba, 10%.
大卫：对。我不知道他们是跟 SpaceX 合作的，还是 Blue Origin。他们把几台 Snowball 设备送到了空间站，然后执行了数据迁移任务。我们之前说过，AWS 在云计算市场的份额约为 39%，Azure 占 21%，阿里云占 10%。
They're the dominant player in China, which is an interesting story in and of itself. Similar to Amazon, it was Alibaba that became the dominant cloud player in China. It'd be fun to dig into how that happened. Google is about 7%.
在中国，阿里云是绝对的市场主导者，这本身就是个很有意思的故事。就像亚马逊一样，阿里巴巴成为了中国的主导云服务商。这个过程很值得深挖。而谷歌云大概占了 7% 的市场份额。
Ben: Yup. It's pretty interesting to look at all the ways they're pressing their advantages too. In 2015, that year, they broke out finances. They also bought Annapurna labs. This is an Israeli company. They started custom designing chips, which we've seen in both their training chips.
本：没错。其实他们如何不断巩固自身优势也很值得关注。2015 年，他们开始单独披露 AWS 财务数据，那年他们还收购了一家以色列公司——Annapurna Labs。从那时起，他们就开始定制设计自己的芯片，比如我们现在看到的训练芯片。
They've done custom. I think they're called Trainium, and then they have inference chips, which are also some crazy name, Inferentia. They have custom machine learning chips.
他们的定制芯片叫 Trainium，用于模型训练。还有用于推理的芯片，名字也很夸张，叫 Inferentia。都是他们为机器学习专门设计的芯片。
David: Do you know who makes these chips?
大卫：你知道这些芯片是谁制造的吗？
Ben: TSMC?
本：台积电？
David: Of course, a big TSMC customer.
大卫：当然，是台积电的大客户。
Ben: The other thing is that, in many ways, it's the embrace-extended strategy that Microsoft ran. First, they have RDS and they're like, you could run anything in RDS. Then they start doing things like launching Amazon Aurora, which is a direct attack at Oracle and a proprietary database software that they own and control. They're like, but it's so fast and it's so performant. It's compatible. Oh, and by the way, we generate much better margins on it.
本：还有一点是，从很多方面看，这其实就是微软当年搞的“拥抱—扩展”策略。最开始他们推出 RDS，说你可以在 RDS 上运行任何数据库。接着他们开始推出 Amazon Aurora，这就是对 Oracle 的正面攻击，同时也是他们自己拥有和控制的专有数据库软件。他们的说法是：Aurora 超快，性能超强，兼容性好。哦对了，我们还能从中获得更高的利润率。
It's all these things that they used to attack Oracle for. They're like, look, now that we have all the customers, why don't we do some proprietary databases, too? We can generate more margins on those. There are ways that they generate huge margins like bandwidth. AWS makes 90+% gross margins on their bandwidth charges.
他们当年攻击 Oracle 的所有那些点，现在自己也都用上了。他们想的是：既然我们已经拥有了这么多客户，那为什么不也搞些专有数据库呢？我们能从中获取更高利润。还有其他高利润来源，比如带宽。AWS 在带宽收费上的毛利率高达 90% 以上。
There are many ways where, yes, cloud is still objectively better than the old way that the licenses were structured, the old way of storing on-prem, the old way of hiring all your own IT people, but also Amazon is starting to feel themselves on the lead that they've generated and run some of the same playbook.
从许多角度来看，云计算确实比过去那种按许可证授权的方式更先进，也比传统本地部署和自建 IT 团队更高效，但现在的亚马逊也开始沉浸于他们建立的领先地位，开始重复那些他们曾经批评过的老套路。
The other thing, so then the question becomes like, why machine learning? Because it's so clear that compute is this massive pillar of the business. Databases has been stood up as not quite as important, but definitely more important from a stickiness perspective. Every year, they announced some new database thing when they're on stage.
还有一个问题，那就是：为什么要做机器学习？因为很明显，计算是这个业务的巨大支柱。数据库虽然没那么“主角”，但在用户粘性层面反而更重要。他们每年都会在发布会上推出新的数据库产品。
Machine learning, they've announced SageMaker. They've broken out the keynote, so now there's a custom ML keynote. They have a whole bunch of cloud-hosted ML offerings. They run TensorFlow, which is funny because that's the thing that Google created. They have their own container service.
在机器学习方面，他们推出了 SageMaker。他们甚至把机器学习单独做成了一场主旨演讲。他们有大量基于云的 ML 服务，还支持 TensorFlow（有趣的是这是谷歌开发的）。他们还有自己的容器服务。
They also have their own elastic Kubernetes service. They have to serve customers, because customers want Kubernetes, but they're trying to get you to use their own custom ACS (Amazon Container Service). What's becoming clear to me is the machine learning capabilities that Amazon has need to be good, but they actually don't need to be as good as Google's, because here's the strategy with machine learning.
他们也提供自家的弹性 Kubernetes 服务。客户想用 Kubernetes，他们就得支持，但他们也试图让客户转用他们的自定义服务 ACS（Amazon Container Service）。现在我越来越清楚，亚马逊在机器学习上的能力必须“够好”，但其实不需要像谷歌那么好。因为机器学习这件事的策略在于：
You're going to use whatever ML is available with where your data is, because running machine learning near your data is the most important thing. Once you've picked Amazon to be your storage vendor, and you've sent semi trucks full of your data into their data centers, you're not shopping around for, oh, where should I run my ML? You're going to run your ML on AWS.
你会选择在数据存放的地方运行机器学习服务，因为“靠近数据”是最重要的。一旦你选择了亚马逊作为存储供应商，把一整卡车的数据送进了他们的数据中心，你就不会再到处比较“我要在哪个平台上跑机器学习”。你只会在 AWS 上运行。
They can't fall crazy behind here, but I think this is one way that even though Google should be best positioned to have better ML offerings than anyone else, it doesn't matter if they're not the place where customers are storing their data.
他们在这个领域不能严重落后，但我认为这说明了一个问题：哪怕谷歌理论上最有条件做出最好的机器学习产品，如果它不是客户存数据的地方，也没意义。
David: Okay. One last element of the story before we transition to analysis. I don't think we can call this a coda because they failed. It's not a coda because they didn't do it.
大卫：好，在我们进入分析环节之前，还有最后一个故事部分。我不认为这可以叫做结尾（coda），因为他们失败了。它不是结尾，因为他们并没有实现它。
Ben: It's a work in progress.
本：这还在推进当中。
David: A work in progress. I think, justifiably so, this has been an AWS love fest. We've heaped so much praise on them. It's like they've done everything right. It's amazing. There's one thing they missed. Ben, do you want to tell us about it?
大卫：对，还在进行中。可以说，我们刚才基本就是在“歌颂” AWS，赞誉有加。他们几乎什么都做对了，令人惊叹。但有一件事他们确实错过了。本，你来讲讲？
Ben: Data warehouses. How is Snowflake its own \$50 billion company?
本：数据仓库。Snowflake 怎么能成为一家独立的 500 亿美元公司？
David: Unbelievable.
大卫：不可思议。
Ben: It stores data in AWS and other public clouds, and it is its own \$50 billion company. What Amazon would tell you is we have Redshift, it's one of the fastest growing Amazon services ever, and it's doing really well. The databases team at Amazon, that whole org has to be very, very unhappy that Snowflake managed to run the gauntlet on the data warehouse market.
本：它的数据存储在 AWS 和其他公有云上，但它本身却是一个 500 亿美元的独立公司。亚马逊方面可能会说，我们有 Redshift，这是 AWS 增长最快的服务之一，表现也很不错。但我想亚马逊的数据库团队，整个部门，对 Snowflake 在数据仓库市场取得的胜利一定非常不满。
David: It's crazy that AWS did not do this.
大卫：AWS 没能自己做到这一点，真的太令人意外了。
Ben: It's probably AWS's biggest failure, and the question is, why? I think there are a few areas. One is just big company stuff. I think before launching something when you're at Amazon's scale, and now that they are the trusted partner of all these IT departments, you've got these security things, operational things, SLA guarantees that they're fully committed to. I think it hamstrings your ability to really streamline a product, be opinionated, and get something to market that's both fast, intuitive, and built for the user.
本：这可能是 AWS 最大的失误。问题是为什么？我认为有几个原因。一个是“大公司病”。当你像亚马逊这样规模庞大，又已经成为各大 IT 部门的信赖合作伙伴时，推出任何新产品之前都要考虑安全性、运营规范、SLA（服务等级协议）等承诺。这会极大限制你打造一个轻量化、有明确方向、面向用户并且快速上市的产品的能力。
I think Redshift requires a lot of customization, whereas Snowflake is awesome for developers out of the box. It's funny that the playbook that Snowflake ran is pretty similar to the playbook that AWS ran when they were just S3 and EC2 serving individual developers. There's a little bit of, they're a victim of their own success on this front.
我觉得 Redshift 需要很多定制化配置，而 Snowflake 是那种“开箱即用”、开发者体验极好的产品。有趣的是，Snowflake 采用的战略和 AWS 早期做 S3 和 EC2 服务个人开发者时几乎如出一辙。某种程度上，AWS 在这个领域是“被自己的成功所累”。
The other one, Ben Thompson pointed this out in a piece that we'll link to in the show notes. It's right there in the name, they're fighting Oracle. They're fighting the last battle with Redshift. It's, hey, take your Oracle-style data warehouse and basically do that in the cloud, rather than lots and lots of Snowflake customers never would have become Oracle customers.
还有一个原因，Ben Thompson 在一篇文章中提到过，我们会在节目注释中附上链接。Redshift 这个名字本身就暴露了他们的意图——他们在和 Oracle 战斗。他们是在用 Redshift 去打“上一个战役”：把传统的 Oracle 式数据仓库搬到云上。而大量 Snowflake 的客户原本根本不会是 Oracle 的客户。
It was a different customer segment with a different set of needs. It's just a fantastic product. That's not really who Amazon was serving. There's new leadership there now, they're getting the house in order, and I think they recognize this, but this was a whiff.
这是完全不同的客户群体，需求也不一样。Snowflake 是一个非常出色的产品，但它不是亚马逊原本服务的对象。现在 AWS 在这个领域已经换了新领导班子，正在重新梳理方向，我相信他们已经意识到这个问题，但这一仗确实打输了。
David: Probably not a whiff on the order of...
大卫：当然这个失误的严重程度还没有到……
Ben: Microsoft and Google whiffing on cloud? Yeah. It's an order of magnitude or two smaller.
本：微软和谷歌在云计算领域的失误那么严重？那倒不至于。这只是小一个甚至两个数量级的差距而已。
David: Yes. AWS, we're going to do analysis now, do grading. There's no way this isn't going to be a very high grade, but if there's a black mark, this is it.
大卫：是的，现在我们要进入分析和评分环节了。毫无疑问，这个分数会非常高，但如果要挑出一个污点，那就是刚才提到的这件事。
Ben: The other thing where they're sort of a victim of their own success is the Amazon two-pizza team thing led them to launch all these different services. Rather than having a cohesive product strategy, AWS has kind of been alphabet soup. I haven't logged into the AWS dashboard in a while but it used to just be so overwhelming. So many amorphous logos that all feel like the same thing, where it's hard to disambiguate between two things.
本：还有一点，他们的成功某种程度上也成了自己的负担。亚马逊的“两块披萨团队”文化导致他们推出了各种不同的服务。没有形成统一的产品战略，AWS 的服务页面简直像是“字母汤”。我已经有一阵子没登录 AWS 控制台了，但以前登录时总是被吓到：图标一大堆，看上去都差不多，让人根本分不清功能之间的区别。
I think Amazon realizes this because their keynotes now seem to be much more about pitching these vertical solutions. Like, here's this thing for this industry. Here's a vertical solution. Here are case studies of other people in your industry rather than first presenting you with, we have 476 services.
我觉得亚马逊也意识到了这个问题，因为他们现在的主旨演讲明显更强调行业解决方案。他们会说，这是为某个特定行业打造的功能，这是垂直解决方案，这是你所在行业里其他客户的案例。不会像以前那样，一上来就说“我们有 476 项服务”。
I think that in the keynotes, they've also really dialed back on what used to be the drumbeat of the keynote, which is, we launched what we consider to be 74 significant features this year, and we're excited to tell you all about them. I think that one for a long time, and now it's created so much confusion for customers that that's actually the bull case for a Google who is a newer entrant, who's coming in with a more cohesive product strategy, and can help customers really understand what they should be doing rather than being like, hey, there are no guardrails, good luck.
我还注意到，在主旨演讲中，他们也不再像过去那样强调“我们今年发布了 74 个重大功能，兴奋地要一一介绍给你”。这套打法持续了很久，但现在反而让客户感到迷茫。这恰恰成了谷歌的利好——作为较晚入局者，谷歌的产品战略更统一，能帮助客户更清晰地知道自己该怎么做，而不是像 AWS 那样说“我们不设限，祝你好运”。
AWS keeps launching even more new services now to provide those guardrails and say, if you use whatever, whatever manager, then you can't get yourself into too much trouble. It's like, oh, cool, 13th standards body. They definitely have a little bit of that cleanup effort going on now. But hey, they got market leadership, and they make far more revenue and far more operating income than anyone else, so it's hard to argue with.
AWS 现在还在不断推出更多的新服务，目的就是为了设立这些“护栏”，告诉你，如果你用这个或那个管理器，就不会搞砸。听上去就像是：“哦，又来了，第十三个标准委员会。”他们确实在进行一些“清理整合”工作。但说到底，他们是市场领导者，收入和运营利润都远超任何竞争对手，所以你也很难真正去质疑他们的做法。
David: Should we transition to analysis?
大卫：那我们是不是该正式进入分析环节了？
Ben: Yeah, let's start with power, because I think AWS is actually one of the best case studies in power of all time. A longtime listener to the show knows power is what enables a business to achieve persistent differential returns, or put another way to become more profitable than their closest competitor, and do so sustainably, so they can build enterprise value and be sustainably more profitable than their nearest competitor. David, when AWS broke out their financials, they were at, did you say 19%? 18%, 19% operating margins?
本：对，让我们从“势能（Power）”开始讲，因为我认为 AWS 是史上最好的“势能”案例之一。老听众知道，“势能”指的是企业实现持续超额收益的能力，换句话说，就是比最近的竞争对手更赚钱，并且长期维持这种优势，持续提升企业价值。大卫，AWS 当年第一次披露财务时，他们的运营利润率是多少来着？你说是 19% 吗？18%？19%？
David: 19%.
大卫：19%。
Ben: Now they're at 30%. They've gotten more profitable when the landscape got more competitive.
本：现在已经到了 30%。在竞争越来越激烈的环境下，他们反而变得更赚钱了。
David: How did that happen?
大卫：这是怎么发生的？
Ben: There's something going on there. There are a couple of things. Moore's Law is in their favor of all their COGS getting materially cheaper over time. If I had to guess, I think they're not discounting for customers as fast as they're realizing both economies of scale. Legitimately just cost coming down from Moore's law.
本：这背后确实有一些关键因素。首先，摩尔定律对他们有利——所有的成本结构（COGS）随着时间都在持续下降。如果让我猜的话，我认为他们在享受到规模经济和硬件成本下降带来的收益时，并没有同步给客户让利。他们的实际成本下降得更快，而对客户的定价并没有同步下调。
I think, actually, what's going on here is, it comes all the way full circle that Amazon is offering Platform as a Service offerings at this point and telling customers, hey, you could just keep using our primitive building blocks, but actually, what you should be doing to take advantage of the full power of the cloud, to run these Lambda functions, or to take advantage of these proprietary databases that are way faster, is to pay us a little bit more margin and take advantage of cloud native things. It's like, ah, the old tricks or the new tricks.
我觉得现在的情况是这样的：亚马逊已经进入提供平台即服务（PaaS）的阶段。他们告诉客户：“你当然可以继续使用我们原始的基础构建块，但如果你想真正发挥云的全部威力，比如运行 Lambda 函数，使用我们超快的专有数据库，那就得多付一点钱，享受这些原生云服务。”这就像老把戏玩出了新花样。
Now you're the incumbent and you're finding way to do margin expansion. The mindset a decade ago or almost two decades ago at this point of, oh, we need to create the platform of the future was right, but you needed to do Infrastructure as a Service as a stepping stone to get there. It turns out that Amazon did that and generated their 18% operating margins. Now, here they are in a more of a Platform as a Service world with customer lock in generating 30% margins.
现在他们成了“现任老大”，开始琢磨怎么扩大利润率。当初他们十几年前制定的那个“要打造未来平台”的战略是正确的，但要实现它，必须先通过基础设施即服务（IaaS）作为垫脚石。结果他们真的做到了，当时赚到了 18% 的运营利润。如今，他们进入了更偏向 PaaS 的阶段，客户粘性更强，利润率达到了 30%。
David: It's funny. I'm looking at the list of seven powers here, which are for folks who are new, counter positioning, scale economies, switching costs, network economies, process, power branding, and cornered resource. I'm like, check, check, check, check, check.
大卫：很有意思。我现在看着“七种势能（seven powers）”的清单——给不熟悉的听众解释一下，它们包括对位策略（counter positioning）、规模经济、转换成本、网络效应、流程势能、品牌势能、稀缺资源垄断（cornered resource）。我一项项看下来，发现每一项都打勾了。
Ben: Right? Early on in the take-off phase, counter positioning all over the place.
本：对吧？早期起飞阶段简直就是对位策略的典范。
David: All over the place.
大卫：到处都是对位策略。
Ben: It was just straight up a business that the incumbents would never have done because it would have cannibalized themselves. Scale economies, this is probably the single greatest scale economies business of all time. I was trying to explore this idea of why now. Why did cloud happen in the late 2000s?
本：这是一个 incumbents（传统巨头）绝对不可能去做的生意，因为会蚕食他们自己的核心业务。再说规模经济，这可能是有史以来最典型的规模经济案例。我之前一直在想一个问题：为什么是那个时候？为什么云计算是在 2000 年代后期开始爆发的？
One answer is mobile, because as the computing devices get smaller, it acquires more of the computing to be done in the cloud. That's definitely accelerated this trend. The other one is Amazon was the first company to ever try and build data centers at this scale, because they needed them to run the largest web application, amazon.com, and cloud is not profitable unless you run it at absolute massive scale.
其中一个答案是移动端的兴起。因为计算设备变小了，更多的计算需求必须转移到云端来完成。这无疑加速了云计算的发展。另一个重要因素是，亚马逊是第一个尝试以这种规模建数据中心的公司，因为他们需要这些数据中心来运行当时最大的 Web 应用——amazon.com。而云计算这种业务只有在绝对规模下才有利润可言。
I think other people may have evaluated this business model in theory, but Amazon was the one that was practically in a position to do it and actually realize the scale economies, or I should say, economies of scale that would lead to the scale economy's power.
我认为其他公司可能在理论上也评估过这种商业模式，但真正具备条件、能付诸实践并最终实现规模经济的，是亚马逊。他们不仅享受到规模经济的好处，更具备了“规模势能”的真正力量。
David: Yup, and it continues to feed itself now. Because Amazon's the biggest, they have the most surface area over which to spread out their capex and infrastructure costs. Thus, they can charge the lowest prices at similar or higher profit margins than their competitors.
大卫：没错，而且现在这个优势还在不断自我强化。因为亚马逊是最大的玩家，他们可以把资本开支和基础设施成本摊到最多的客户和服务上。所以他们可以在保持同样甚至更高利润率的同时，提供最低的价格。
Ben: It's amazing. Then you layer on the switching costs. Once people are semi trucking their data into your data centers, there are very real switching costs.
本：太强了。再加上转换成本。一旦人们用半挂卡车把数据运进你的数据中心，那个转换成本就是实打实的了。
David: Amazon.com took 13 years to offload off of Oracle onto AWS. If that's not switching costs in this industry, I don't know what is.
大卫：Amazon.com 花了整整 13 年才把自己的系统从 Oracle 迁移到 AWS。如果这都不算转换成本，那我真不知道还有什么能算。
Ben: Branding is very clear. By being the leader at this point, they're just winning. Even if people want to do the multi-cloud thing, they're basically like, cool. Do Amazon and one of the others. Their market leadership position.
本：品牌效应也非常明显。现在 AWS 已经是市场领导者了，他们就是赢家。即便有客户想搞“多云战略”，基本上也会说，“好吧，就选 Amazon 加另外一家。”AWS 的市场领导地位已经深入人心。
When they say things like, this is the fastest growing Amazon service ever, they're reinforcing this idea of everyone else's and everything we launched, customers love. I do think people are totally willing to pay up at this point, because they just view it as this will cost us less in the long-term than if we make the wrong technology choice and then need to move again.
当他们说“这是亚马逊历史上增长最快的服务”时，其实就是在不断强化一种信号：我们推出的所有产品都广受客户欢迎。我认为现在的客户已经愿意多花点钱了，因为他们认为长期来看，这比选错技术方向、以后还得再迁移一次要省钱得多。
David: There are also the competitors. At this point, probably with Microsoft and Google, you can feel more safe. But for the longest time, their strategies were all over the place. As a customer, I don't have any trust that I can build on your cloud strategy and it's not going to completely change in the next several years.
大卫：还有就是竞争对手。现在用微软和谷歌的云服务或许可以放心一点了，但在很长一段时间里，他们的策略都不太明确。作为客户，我根本不敢相信你们的云战略几年后不会彻底变样。
Ben: Totally, totally agree.
本：完全同意，太对了。
David: Whereas Amazon has just been consistent.
大卫：而亚马逊一直都非常稳定。
Ben: Yup. I will say, I think a tailwind for Microsoft has been multi-cloud. This idea that, hey, you don't want vendor lock in, so you really should have some redundancy or spread out your infrastructure across multiple cloud providers. I think enterprises over the last 5–8 years really bought that narrative hook, line, and sinker. It's a reasonable narrative.
本：没错。我得说，微软这些年受益很大的一股东风就是“多云策略”。也就是说，企业不想被某一家供应商锁死，所以应该做一些冗余，把基础设施分布在多个云服务提供商上。我觉得过去五到八年，企业几乎是全盘接受了这个说法——而且这是个合理的逻辑。
I remember, there's a parallel to mobile development here. When I was an iPhone developer, people were telling me, use PhoneGap. I'm like, why? Then I won't get to use any of the cool stuff that iOS lets you do, like the latest APIs and the lowest level hardware features. They're like, yeah, but then you don't need to write an Android app too, so your development costs are lower. I'd be like, well, but I'll make an app no one wants to use. So sure, my costs will be lower, but I won't get to make an actually interesting application.
我记得这让我联想到移动开发。当我还是 iPhone 开发者时，有人建议我用 PhoneGap。我说为什么？那我就无法使用 iOS 提供的酷功能，比如最新的 API、底层硬件特性。他们说，对啊，但你就不用再写 Android 版本了，开发成本更低。我就会说，那我做出来的是没人想用的 App。是的，开发成本是低了，但我也做不出真正有趣的应用了。
I think there's some argument here in multi-cloud, where it's like, okay, cool, you're going to use everyone's Infrastructure as a Service. But more far enough in the development of cloud now where these vendors are doing actually interesting Platform as a Service things, so you do want to take advantage of that.
我觉得“多云”策略也有类似问题。你可以说，“好，我来用每家的基础设施即服务（IaaS）。” 但现在云的发展已经很深入了，这些供应商已经在做真正有意思的 PaaS（平台即服务）层的产品，你肯定也想用上这些功能。
This is the Amazon argument, which they've argued in the last two keynotes that they started showing up magically in 2021 in keynotes, where they're realizing, oh, crap, multi-cloud is making it so that a bunch of the revenue that could be coming to us is going mostly to Microsoft, but a little bit to Google as people diversify this space.
这是亚马逊的说法——他们从 2021 年开始，在过去两年的主旨演讲中突然开始强调这个。他们意识到，“糟糕，多云策略导致本来该流向我们的一大笔收入现在分流到了微软，还有一小部分流到了谷歌”，因为客户在分散风险。
Really, what we want to do is convince people. Actually, you'll save money, because you'll have less complexity to manage with multi-cloud, and you'll get the functionality of all the cool things that we're launching which require all the tight integration. Again, the thing that they were fighting against when they first launched now that they're the big incumbent...
我们真正想做的是说服客户：实际上你会省钱，因为如果不搞多云，你需要管理的复杂性会少得多，而且还能使用我们正在发布的所有很酷的新功能，而这些都需要深度集成才能实现。讽刺的是，这正是当年他们刚进入市场时曾经猛烈批评的那种行为，现在他们自己成了老大……
David: They're running the playbook.
大卫：他们开始照着那套剧本来了。
Ben: Yeah.
本：对。
David: Of course, that's how it works.
大卫：当然，这就是商业的运作方式。
Ben: The cycle of life.
本：生命周期啊。
David: I have a slight sidebar question. We talked about all the other big technology companies that whiffed on cloud. We didn't talk about Apple at all. Did they whiff on this too or is this something that's just like, this is not Apple?
大卫：我有个小问题。我们刚才聊了所有在云计算领域“失手”的科技巨头，但完全没提苹果。他们也是错过了这个机会吗？还是说这本来就不是苹果的风格？
Ben: It's a good question. It's not Apple the way I think of Apple. In fact, I even think iCloud's back end is Azure, or at least for a long time was Azure.
本：这是个好问题。我觉得从苹果的定位来看，这确实不太像是他们会做的事。事实上，我记得 iCloud 的后台可能就是跑在 Azure 上的，或者至少曾经长期运行在 Azure 上。
David: It was AWS. There was 16, maybe, New York Times article that came out, where they reported that it was AWS and Apple got very upset about it.
大卫：是 AWS。有篇大概是 2016 年的《纽约时报》文章披露了这点，说苹果的数据后台在用 AWS，结果苹果对此非常不高兴。
Ben: I bet. Apple basically doesn't serve enterprises. I know they sell laptops and phones to companies in bulk, and they have enterprise relationship managers for companies. But this is not Apple's wheelhouse. That said, Tim Cook's Apple is very different from the Apple that I hold in my head. Tim Cook's Apple is wherever there is durable, high margin revenue. This actually is Tim Cook's wheelhouse. I think if he had the sales force to go after this, I think he would do it.
本：我完全能想象。苹果基本上并不直接服务企业客户。我知道他们会向公司批量销售笔记本电脑和手机，也有企业客户经理。但这并不是苹果的主场。不过话说回来，库克时代的苹果和我心目中的苹果已经很不一样了。现在的苹果只要发现哪里有持续、高利润的收入，就会考虑进入。所以从这个角度看，这反而是库克的主场。如果他有合适的销售团队，我相信他是会进入云计算市场的。
David: I totally agree. Apple's a consumer technology company. Yeah, maybe they should be running their own iCloud data centers. No, probably not. But developers are so important to Apple. They are so and should be so close and in touch with developers.
大卫：我完全同意。苹果是一家面向消费者的科技公司。也许他们应该运营自己的 iCloud 数据中心，但可能并不需要。但开发者对苹果来说是非常关键的群体。他们应该也必须和开发者保持密切联系。
Apple has had its own drawbacks of a high margin business model recently in a monopoly with their developer relationships. Mobile, like you said, was the first beachhead for the cloud. Should Apple have been offering something for developers there too? I don't know. It didn't happen, so it doesn't matter.
苹果的高利润模式，在与开发者关系上其实也带来了一些弊端，甚至引发了“垄断”的指责。正如你所说，移动端其实是云计算的第一块滩头阵地。那苹果是否应该也为开发者提供一些云相关服务呢？我不知道。但反正他们没做，所以这也就无从谈起。
Ben: They have spun up something where you can build your applications in the cloud now, but I assume It's all just white labeled AWS or Microsoft.
本：他们现在是有提供一些可以在云端构建应用的服务，但我猜那背后其实就是贴牌的 AWS 或微软服务。
David: Yeah. You never know with Apple, but I think the ship has sailed.
大卫：是啊。你永远猜不透苹果，但我觉得这艘船已经开走了。
Ben: Yeah. I do know Facebook uses AWS.
本：对。我知道 Facebook 是会用 AWS 的。
David: Interesting.
大卫：有意思。
Ben: Facebook has their own first party data centers that they operate, because they're obviously at such massive scale where that makes sense. But then they also use AWS for some stuff.
本：Facebook 有他们自己的数据中心，因为他们规模太大了，自己建更划算。但他们也会用 AWS 来跑部分业务。
David: I'm trying to think about, does AWS have network economy power? I don't think so.
大卫：我在想，AWS 有没有网络效应势能？我觉得没有。
Ben: I don't either.
本：我也觉得没有。
David: I don't think I care if you use AWS.
大卫：我不会因为你用 AWS 而更倾向用它。
Ben: No, it's indirect. It shows up in scale economies, because my stuff gets cheaper because you use it.
本：对，它是间接的。更多体现在规模经济上。因为你用它，我的成本也更低了。
David: I think that's the only of the big five of the seven powers, so not including process power and cornered resource, which are esoteric special cases. I think network economies is the only one that AWS doesn't have, but index is off the charts on the other four—counter positioning, scale economies, switching costs, and branding.
大卫：在七种势能中的五个主要类目里——不包括“流程势能”和“垄断性资源”这两个比较特殊的——网络效应可能是 AWS 唯一没有的。但在另外四项上，它都处于爆表状态：对位策略、规模经济、转换成本和品牌势能。
Ben: Yup.
本：没错。
David: Okay. We talked a little bit about what would have happened otherwise with Apple. We talked about it as we went along with the other big technology companies. Should we move on to playbook?
大卫：好，我们刚刚聊了如果苹果进入这个市场会怎样，也顺带谈了其他科技巨头。我们现在来聊聊“战略打法（playbook）”怎么样？
Ben: Yeah, let's do it. My first thing to highlight in playbook is a perfect transition from the Seven Powers, because I do think this is actually the best scale economy business of all time. Because the fixed costs are so enormous, you amortize them across a huge customer base, you're rewarded for that massive scale, and for making these ungodly large investments, for the first time, they just invested so much in building out new data centers for AWS.
本：好啊。关于战略打法，我要强调的第一点其实可以很好地承接我们刚才讨论的“七种势能”，因为我认为 AWS 是有史以来最典型的“规模经济型”企业。它的固定成本非常庞大，但正因为如此，你可以将这些成本摊销到极大的客户基础上，这种规模会直接带来回报。他们首次为 AWS 建设数据中心时，投入之大可谓惊人。
They actually took Amazon cashflow negative. Their free cash flow is massively negative over the last 12 months because of these continued unbelievably large investments. I think this is a business that would have taken enormous scale to get to profitability at all.
他们甚至把整个亚马逊的自由现金流都拉成负的。在过去 12 个月中，自由现金流非常负面，原因就是这些持续性的、难以置信的投资规模。我认为，这种业务必须达到极大的规模才可能盈利。
Now that they have it, it's one of these self-fulfilling prophecies, where now that they're massively the market leader, they just have to keep going. There could be a self-inflicted wound or soccer people call it an own goal, but once you have this scale economies power going, I just think it's pretty hard to drop the ball at this point.
而如今他们已经达到了这个规模，它就成了一种“自我实现的预言”。你已经是市场领导者，你只需要继续推进。当然，也可能出现“自伤”或“乌龙球”这种情况，但只要你的规模经济在运转，我认为现在基本上很难掉链子了。
David: We've alluded to this for years on Acquired. We've talked about it a lot on this episode. AWS is a utility company. Think about what a utility company is. It's exactly what you described. It's the ultimate scale economy business.
大卫：我们在《Acquired》节目里多年来都在暗示这一点，这一集我们也反复强调——AWS 实际上就是一家“公共事业公司”。你想想看什么叫公共事业公司？这正是你刚才描述的：一个极致的规模经济型行业。
It is something that requires so much capex that society as a whole decides that there should be a centralized provider of this. In most other utility cases, they are regulated by the government about how much profit margin they can take, because otherwise, they could take massively exorbitant profits and extort customers. AWS happens to be an unregulated utility for the Internet, which is maybe the biggest market of all time.
它需要巨额的资本支出，因此社会整体倾向于由一个集中的服务商来提供这项基础设施。在大多数公共事业领域，政府会介入监管利润率，否则这些公司可能会牟取暴利，盘剥用户。而 AWS 正好是“互联网的公共事业公司”，而且它还没有被监管——而互联网可能是历史上最大的市场。
Ben: Well put. Here's the interesting point I want to make on that. There's that common refrain of like, wow, I can't believe Amazon. The ecommerce company became the cloud company. From this perspective, this is exactly the same thing, that the amazon.com retail business was—an ungodly amount of investment in the fulfillment network globally in order to sell stuff to a big group of customers in a massively amortized way. It's just a data center instead of a fulfillment center. They had the right mindset for this business.
本：你说得太好了。我想补充一个有趣的观点。人们经常会感叹：“哇，没想到亚马逊这个电商公司最后成了云计算巨头。”但从这个角度来看，其实这完全是一回事。amazon.com 的零售业务本身也是在全球范围内投入了惊人的资源，建设履约网络来服务庞大的客户群体，以此实现成本的大规模摊销。唯一的区别是现在他们建的是数据中心，而不是物流中心。他们一开始就拥有这个业务所需的正确思维模式。
David: It's actually a very similar business at scale.
大卫：从规模化角度看，这两种业务其实非常相似。
Ben: Yes. Another one that I had is price cuts. This is not something we talked about in history and facts, but I do think it's worth calling out. By 2012, and keep in mind, they had very little competition up to this point, they had already done 23 price reductions across the board for all of their services. By 2013, they had done 40. By 2015, they had done 51. They were proactively, without competitive pressure, reducing prices.
本：对，我还想提一个就是降价策略。虽然我们在前面的历史与事实环节里没有具体讲到，但我觉得这是必须要强调的一点。到 2012 年——注意那时他们几乎没有什么竞争对手——AWS 已经主动对其所有服务进行了 23 次降价。2013 年这个数字是 40 次，到了 2015 年，是 51 次。他们是在没有外部压力的情况下主动降价。
The question is, why? It reminded me of TSMC. Speaking of Hamilton and Seven Powers in our conversation with him and Chenyi, he pointed out that it made sense for TSMC to proactively lower prices for customers in order to win business. What you're essentially doing there is you're giving up current day profit dollars to gain something in the future. That's the obvious part.
问题是：为什么这么做？这让我想到了台积电。我们之前和 Hamilton 以及陈怡在谈“七种势能”时也提过，他指出台积电主动为客户降价是有战略意义的，目的是赢得订单。本质上你是在牺牲当期利润，去争取未来的收益。这是显而易见的部分。
The less obvious part in the TSMC case is that since the cost to build out a new chip fab are so large and so lumpy, like \$10 billion all at once, it's super advantageous to have that predictability of customer orders. On top of that, there's a finite number of the machines available to manufacture those high-end chips, the ones that ASML makes, so it pays doubly to be able to know for sure you can be one of the few to get those.
在台积电的例子中，不那么显而易见的一点是，建一座晶圆厂的成本极高、非常集中，一次性投入可能就是 100 亿美元。所以你要提前锁定客户订单的确定性，这是极大的优势。而且生产高端芯片的设备，比如 ASML 的光刻机，数量是有限的。如果你能确定自己是少数几个能拿到这批设备的企业，那就双重受益。
AWS has the same thing going on, whereas the ASML machines are much more scarce than the servers that AWS is buying. It's unbelievably helpful for AWS to win market share so they can do their thing and invest more in building out more data centers to keep that thing going. That proactive price drops works not quite as well as it does for TSMC, but they get rewarded for it for sure.
AWS 其实也是类似的逻辑。虽然 ASML 的设备比 AWS 的服务器稀缺得多，但对 AWS 来说，抢占市场份额也同样关键。赢得市场后，他们可以继续推进业务、投入更多资金扩建数据中心，保持这套增长循环。虽然主动降价对 AWS 的回报没有台积电那么直接，但他们确实从中受益匪浅。
David: Yeah. This was such a good point from Hamilton. The strategy is not just to win business, it's to be able to feel confident about building out ahead of the curve on infrastructure to enable scale economies or further drive scale economies.
大卫：对，这是 Hamilton 提出的一个非常好的观点。这种战略不仅是为了赢得客户，更是为了有信心超前建设基础设施，从而实现规模经济，或者进一步强化现有的规模经济。
Ben: Here's a thing that is unfortunate about AWS relative to the amazon.com business, speaking of building out infrastructure. We talked about float in the amazon.com business. Customer makes an order, customer pays immediately, Amazon gets net 60 or so to pay a supplier. It's the opposite in cloud.
本：不过，说到基础设施投入，AWS 相比 amazon.com 零售业务有一点挺吃亏的。我们之前讲过 amazon.com 的“浮存金”模型：客户下单后立即付款，但亚马逊可以 60 天后才向供应商付款。而在云业务中情况正好相反。
David: Right. This is why they have \$100 billion revenue backlog. From this dimension, that's a terrible thing.
大卫：没错。这也是为什么他们会有 1000 亿美元的收入积压。从这个角度看，这是个很头疼的问题。
Ben: Amazon doesn't get this money up front. Their whole thing to customers is you don't have to pay up front to install servers. There are reserved instances, but there are ways that they try to get a little bit more upfront cash. But they have to go build these whole data centers buying all this real estate, buying those servers or leasing, however they structure them.
本：亚马逊在云服务这块拿不到预付款。他们的主张是客户不需要提前花大钱建服务器。虽然有“预留实例”这种方式能让他们拿回一点现金，但他们自己必须先投钱建数据中心、买土地、购入服务器（或以某种方式租赁设备），无论结构怎么安排，前期投入都是巨大的。
They've had to get creative with capital leases on the data centers instead of buying them upfront, so that they can make the data centers effectively pay as you go just like their revenue is pay as you go. They don't get the incredible business model, the negative cash conversion cycle thing that they have in the retail business in AWS. I think that's important to understand. While this business is much higher margin, their effective cost of capital is higher.
他们只能通过资本租赁等方式来搞点“财技”，而不是一次性买断数据中心，用这种方式让数据中心“像收入一样按需付费”。AWS 完全没有享受到零售业务中那种负现金转换周期的商业模式优势。这一点很关键——虽然云业务利润率更高，但它的资本成本也更高。
David: I guess, Amazon stock price, I don't think dropped that much. But people freaked out this past quarter when Amazon reported the hugely negative cash flow. And this is why. That is also why you shouldn't be that worried about it. But compared to their retail business that has a negative cash cycle, this is a less attractive element of the AWS business model.
大卫：我记得这季度亚马逊的股价其实没跌太多。但当他们公布巨额负现金流的时候，市场反应还是挺激烈的。其实这正是原因所在。不过这也是为什么你也不用太担心。只是相比他们负现金周期的零售业务来说，AWS 这一块确实没那么有吸引力。
Ben: Yup. All right. Another one I had is I was reading from friends of the show, Tegus. They had this great transcript that I was reading from a former AWS business development person on the obsession around multi-cloud. It got me thinking a lot around multi-cloud.
本：对。我还想说一点。我最近在看我们节目的朋友 Tegus 提供的一份精彩访谈稿，是一位前 AWS 商务拓展人员讲的，话题是大家对“多云策略”的执念。这让我对多云有了很多思考。
The evolution of what cloud means has completely changed. When cloud first started, it meant use these primitive building blocks in our data center, our being Amazon, and pay as you go. What it has evolved to mean is use our cloud services, which exists now at a higher level of abstraction, and some of which are proprietary. And it doesn't actually have to be in our data center.
“云”的含义已经发生了彻底的变化。一开始云计算的意思是：在我们的数据中心（也就是亚马逊的）使用这些原始构建块，按需付费。而现在，云的意思变成了使用我们提供的服务，这些服务抽象层更高，其中一些还是专有的，而且不一定非得运行在我们的数据中心里。
The interesting thing about where a multi-cloud and hybrid cloud is going, multi-cloud being Amazon and Microsoft, and hybrid cloud being in your data center and in our data center. In the most recent AWS keynote, they announced a bunch of services which are AWS cloud services that run in your data center, where Amazon employees come and install servers and maintain servers in your data center.
关于多云和混合云的未来走向，这里面有个很有意思的趋势：多云指的是比如 Amazon 加 Microsoft，混合云则是你的数据中心加我们的数据中心。在最近一场 AWS 主旨演讲中，他们发布了一批新服务，这些服务是 AWS 的云服务，但却运行在你的数据中心里——是由亚马逊员工来你的机房安装和维护这些服务器。
David: It's the old Oracle business model all over again.
大卫：这不就是 Oracle 当年的商业模式翻版吗？
Ben: Right? They're like, well, it is great because you get access to Lamda right there in the cloud. You're like, sorry, what? How's it in the cloud? They're like, yeah, because it's AWS Lambda. It's cloud because it's Lambda, but it's in your data center, it's in the cloud. I'm like, what do these words even mean anymore?
本：对吧？他们会说，“太棒了，你可以在云上直接访问 Lambda。”你就会反问，“等下，这怎么是云？不是跑在我机房里吗？”他们说，“是 Lambda，所以就是云。”我的反应是：这些词现在到底还是什么意思？
It was funny. Reading this transcript really made me start to contemplate, what is cloud even now? Because it also exists in multiple clouds and your data center. It really actually ends up being about the set of proprietary services that you're building your application on rather than where it's running.
读那份访谈真的让我开始认真思考：现在所谓的“云”到底是什么？它既存在于多家云厂商之间，也存在于你的自有数据中心里。归根到底，它的意义已经从“运行在哪里”转变为“你依赖哪些专有服务构建应用”。
David: I guess these days, it means back to the beginning of the episode. It means you're IT infrastructure, you are calling via an API. I think that's what cloud means.
大卫：我觉得现在“云”的意思，其实回到了我们这集开头讲的——你通过 API 远程调用 IT 基础设施，我想这就是现在“云”的定义。
Ben: Yup. Someone's going to finish this episode and be like, well, I thought I knew what the cloud was. Then Ben and David talked for three hours, and now I don't know what it is anymore.
本：对。估计听完这集之后会有人说，“我原本以为我知道什么是云的，结果听了 Ben 和 David 聊了三个小时后，我完全不知道云到底是啥了。”
David: Yeah. You know it when you see it.
大卫：是啊，这就像“你看到它时就知道它是云”，仅此而已。
Ben: Yup. All right, another one, make something people want. This is the YC slogan, but this is exactly what Amazon did. I think Microsoft and Google both wanted to build something that they thought would be an amazing business model and something that was very clever to them as technologists. What Amazon decided to do is figure out what startups wanted to build on, figure out what IT managers wanted to lift and shift to, and just build that.
本：对。好，另外一个点是“做人们真正想要的东西”。这是 YC 的口号，但这正是亚马逊所做的。微软和谷歌想的是打造一个他们作为技术人员觉得很聪明、很优雅的商业模式。而亚马逊的选择是：去了解创业公司想要构建在什么基础上，了解 IT 经理们想要迁移到什么平台，然后就照着那个去做。
It's boring, but it comes through in all these keynotes. Every single thing has a customer use case attached to it, a customer use case that drove them to develop it. It's funny how they refuse to do things like, for the longest time, people are like, why aren't you doing anything in blockchain?
虽然这听起来很无聊，但在他们的每一场主旨演讲中都体现得非常清楚。每一个产品发布背后都有一个客户的使用场景，是客户的实际需求驱动他们去开发这个功能。有意思的是，他们对很多热门概念都持保留态度，比如区块链。很长一段时间里，大家都问他们：“你们为什么不做区块链相关的服务？”
Andy Jassy's comment on stage is he's like, we don't really understand the customer use case yet. This was in 2015 or 16. This is six years before the recent buzz around Web3 use cases. I just think they're so focused on that as the very first question you have to ask before investing a single dollar of engineering resources. It's just very impressive.
安迪·贾西在台上的回应是：“我们现在还没有看到明确的客户使用场景。”这还是在 2015 或 2016 年说的，比后来 Web3 用例大火早了六年。我觉得他们真的非常专注于这件事：在投入任何一美元研发资源之前，必须先弄清楚客户真正的需求是什么。这点让我非常佩服。
David: Whereas in that same timeframe, didn't Microsoft have those ads with common blockchain in the cloud, on Microsoft? IBM was doing a corporate blockchain.
大卫：但在同一时期，微软不是已经在做区块链云广告了吗？什么“在 Microsoft 云上构建区块链”？IBM 也在搞企业级区块链。
Ben: Yeah. They eventually did roll something out that was like, this isn't a blockchain, but we think that accomplishes the same thing that you people who are asking for block chain–based enterprise infrastructure are asking for.
本：是的。他们最终也确实推出了些东西，但意思是：“这不是真正的区块链，但我们觉得它能实现你们这些想用区块链搭建企业基础设施的目标。”
David: Interesting.
大卫：挺有意思的。
Ben: My next one is about asymmetric upside. This is another Bezos letter that I'm going to quote from 2015 where he says, "Given a 10% chance of 100 times payoff, you should make that bet every time, but you're still going to be wrong 9 times out of 10. We all know that if you swing for the fences, you're going to strike out a lot, but you're also going to hit some home runs.
本：我接下来说的是“非对称回报”。这是我引用贝索斯在 2015 年股东信中的一段话：“如果有 10% 的机会带来 100 倍的回报，那你应该每次都下注，尽管你 10 次中会有 9 次失败。我们都知道，大力挥棒常常会被三振出局，但你也有机会打出本垒打。”
The difference between baseball and business, however, is that a baseball has a truncated outcome distribution. When you swing, no matter how well you connect with the ball, the most runs you can ever get is four. In business, every once in a while, when you step up to the plate, you can score a thousand runs. This long tail distribution of returns is why it's important to be bold. Big winners pay for so many experiments."
“棒球和商业的区别在于，棒球的回报是有上限的。你挥棒再好，最多也只能拿 4 分。但在商业中，有时你一挥棒，就能打出 1000 分。商业的回报呈长尾分布，这就是为什么我们要大胆尝试。一个大赢家就能覆盖无数次失败的成本。”
David: Market size unconstrained.
大卫：“市场规模无限制。”
Ben: Market size unconstrained.
本：“市场规模无限制。”
David: I think that's got to be like a catchphrase on Acquired that we should incorporate.
大卫：我觉得这句话得成为《Acquired》的金句之一，我们得好好用起来。
Ben: Oh, for sure. Let's put it on some merch.
本：当然！我们得把这句“市场规模无限制”印到周边产品上。
David: Yeah.
大卫：没错。
Ben: This is the year after he makes the market size unconstrained comment about AWS. I just think it's such a perfect illustration. A lot of people make fun of certain venture capital investments. I'm only interested in the ones people are making fun of, because the whole point of venture capital is seeking these crazy asymmetric longtail returns.
本：这正好是他提出“市场规模无限制”这句话的下一年。我觉得这太能说明问题了。很多人会嘲笑某些风险投资项目，但我恰恰只对那些被人嘲笑的投资感兴趣，因为风投的本质就是去寻找那些疯狂的非对称长尾回报。
I think Jeff Bezos got that better than most VCs do. He's a phenomenal, high beta capital allocator. In running a company, he was also a very good operational CEO and also an actual genius.
我觉得杰夫·贝索斯对这一点的理解，甚至比大多数风险投资人还要深。他是个出色的高风险资本配置者。同时在管理公司方面，他又是非常优秀的运营型 CEO，而且是真正意义上的天才。
All of these things, there are lots to say about Jeff Bezos. He's absolutely a genius. He's absolutely a brilliant operator. But maybe even more than these things, he just gets capital allocation. That's why I think Amazon is effectively the highest performing venture returns in history. AWS is a venture bet in their portfolio that they own 100% of.
说起贝索斯，可以讲的太多了。他确实是个天才，也确实是个杰出的管理者。但也许最重要的一点是，他对资本配置的理解无人能及。这就是为什么我觉得亚马逊的表现堪比历史上最成功的风投项目。而 AWS 就是他们投资组合中的一个“风险投资”，只不过这次他们自己持有了 100%。
David: Also that quote, what did he say? "In baseball, you have truncated returns"?
大卫：还有他那句名言，他说什么来着？“棒球的回报是有上限的”？
Ben: A truncated outcome distribution.
本：“截断型的结果分布。”
David: Truncated outcome distribution. That's the most Jeff Bezos thing ever.
大卫：“截断型结果分布。” 这句话太贝索斯了，简直他的典型风格。
Ben: Right.
本：对啊。
David: I'm sure that Aaron Judge is thinking that, because the place is like, oh, if only I didn't have a truncated outcome distribution. It's so great, which also reminds me sidebar, because we're deep in the episode here. Watching the re\:Invent keynote with Reed Hastings, it's been so long since we did our two Netflix series.
大卫：我敢肯定，Aaron Judge（MLB 球星）可能在心里也想：“要是棒球没有这种截断回报就好了。”太有意思了。说起来插个题外话，我们已经讲了很久了。最近看 AWS re\:Invent 大会时看到 Reed Hastings 出场，我突然想到我们之前做的两期 Netflix 专题节目。
Ben: Yeah, we need a part three.
本：对啊，我们得做第三集。
David: When was that? It was years ago, but I think they're still really good. It'd be fun to go back and relisten to them. Reed Hastings is a huge nerd.
大卫：那是什么时候的事了？好几年前了吧，但那两期节目我觉得现在听还是很棒。回去再听一遍应该会很有意思。Reed Hastings 真的是个超级极客。
Ben: Oh, yeah. He started his career doing a data storage company.
本：对啊，他的职业生涯一开始就是做数据存储公司的。
David: Yes. I think of him now as like, oh, Reed Hastings CEO and founder of Netflix. He's a business guy like Bezos. No, he's a true geek.
大卫：没错。现在我们都把他当作 Netflix 的 CEO 和创始人，以为他是像贝索斯那样的商业型人物。其实不然，他是个真正的极客。
Ben: He's an engineer, and his engineering project is his company.
本：他是个工程师，他的公司就是他的工程项目。
David: Yes. I mean that in the highest possible compliment.
大卫：是的，这话是最高度的赞美。
Ben: Those people are the people you could listen to talk forever, because they speak with such precision about their strategy, because it's actually thought through to a layer deeper than the platitude and stuff you normally hear.
本：这种人你能听他们讲话听一整天，因为他们讲战略的时候非常精准，是经过深思熟虑的，不是你平时听到的那些口号式、表面化的说辞。
David: Yup.
大卫：没错。
Ben: All right, here's my last one. You brought it up earlier in the episode, and I wanted to save it to the end of playbook, because I think it contrasts my takeaway from the last episode.
本：好，这是我最后一个点了。你在这集节目早些时候提过，我特意留到最后来讲，因为我觉得它和我们上一集节目的结论形成鲜明对比。
I use this analogy that Amazon would quickly spin something up, learn from it, and if it wasn't the right thing, kill it and take the learnings to do the next thing. I think I called that brute force maze finding or pathfinding.
我之前用过一个类比：亚马逊会快速做出一个原型，然后从中学习，如果发现方向不对就迅速砍掉，再用这些经验去做下一个项目。我称之为“蛮力走迷宫”或“路径探测式”创新。
AWS is different. They don't really have a Fire Phone or zShops. The biggest reason for this is when you launch a service for enterprise customers, it is really hard to kill it. You burn customer trust. Actually, if you think about what's the bigger risk, burning the trust and losing the customer and all their future revenue, or having to maintain a crappy service that didn't work? You just maintain the service.
但 AWS 不一样。他们没有像 Fire Phone 或 zShops 那种“实验失败产品”。最主要的原因是，一旦你为企业客户推出一个服务，想要砍掉它是非常困难的。这会伤害客户的信任。你想想看，哪个风险更大：是烧掉客户信任、失去他们未来所有收入，还是维护一个表现不佳的服务？答案显然是后者。所以他们选择继续维护。
David: Right. It's such a good point.
大卫：对，这真是个很好的观点。
Ben: There are stuff that didn't live up to the full potential, like all the productivity applications they've ever tried, WorkMail...
本：确实有些产品没有发挥出预期潜力，比如他们做过的所有办公生产力工具，像 WorkMail……
David: Chime.
大卫：还有 Chime。
Ben: Their IoT offering, Greengrass. I think IoT just didn't pan out the way that everyone wanted it to. They launched something in 2013 called AppStream to run mobile apps in the cloud. The commitment to maintaining these things is just completely different in AWS than in the consumer business. The biggest illustration is SimpleDB.
本：还有他们的 IoT 产品 Greengrass。我觉得物联网根本没能实现当初大家想象的潜力。他们在 2013 年还推出过一个叫 AppStream 的服务，可以在云端运行移动应用。AWS 对这些服务的持续维护承诺，和他们在消费类业务里的做法是完全不同的。最典型的例子是 SimpleDB。
DynamoDB comes out, it's way more performant. It has a similar job to be done. SimpleDB had all kinds of cost issues for Amazon, but there were customers using it, so they kept it up. I think one of those customers was even Netflix. They just didn't want to deprecate something that customers were using.
后来 DynamoDB 出来了，性能强很多，解决的也是类似的需求。而 SimpleDB 对亚马逊来说问题重重，成本高、效率低，但因为有客户在用，他们还是坚持维持服务运行。我记得其中一个客户甚至是 Netflix。他们就是不愿意废弃一个仍有客户使用的服务。
David: Yeah. This is why you'd log on to the AWS product page and there are 200 services there. It's such a good point. It's not worth it to them to kill anything.
大卫：没错。这也是为什么你一登录 AWS 的产品页面，会发现上面列着 200 个服务。这真是个很好的解释。对他们来说，砍掉任何一个服务都不值得。
Ben: Yup. All right, grading?
本：对啊。好了，来评分吧？
David: Do we even really need to discuss this?
大卫：我们真的还需要讨论吗？
Ben: We could be like, okay, plus, we're done. Actually, I'm going to stretch this out from just AWS and talk about all of Amazon.
本：我们可以就说“A+，结束”。但其实我想把话题从 AWS 扩展到整个亚马逊公司来谈谈。
David: Okay, great.
大卫：好啊，很棒。
Ben: To evaluate it going forward. What is a market cap?
本：我们要评估它未来的表现。那么，“市值”到底是什么？
David: Market cap unconstrained.
大卫：“市值无限制”。
Ben: What is value? What is money? What is market cap? Market cap is the sum of all future cash flows discounted to the present day at some discount rate. The long-term, the market is a weighing machine, even if the short-term is a voting machine. Thank you to Warren Buffett.
本：什么是价值？什么是金钱？什么是市值？市值是未来所有现金流按某一贴现率折现到今天的总和。从长期来看，市场是一台称重机；即使短期来看，它是一台投票机。感谢沃伦·巴菲特的这句话。
Amazon has a \$1.5 trillion market cap. They had a five-year run where they generated some cash, and then the pandemic hit, and they made a bunch of reinvestments. Now, they're certainly not generating cash. Up until 2015, they broke even. They know how to do one thing really, really, really well, which is reinvest every single dollar into growing.
本：亚马逊现在的市值是 1.5 万亿美元。他们曾有连续五年实现了一些现金流，然后疫情来了，他们又进行了大量再投资。现在，他们显然不在产出现金。直到 2015 年，他们的经营几乎都是打平的。他们非常擅长做一件事——把每一美元都投入到增长中去。
I'm very curious what this business looks like when they stop doing that. At some point, will they see when they're actually saturating all their total addressable markets and ease back on growth so that they can generate the maybe hundreds of billions of dollars in profits per year they need to justify this market cap?
我非常好奇，如果有一天他们停止再投资，这家公司会是什么样子？总有一天他们会意识到自己的可服务市场（TAM）已经饱和，那时他们是否会放慢增长节奏，开始产生每年可能数千亿美元的利润，从而证明自己的市值是合理的？
If you're worth \$1.5 trillion, it does suppose that you're spitting off \$100 billion a year or somewhere on that order of cash, which we've never seen them do or come close to doing. Either they need to continue operating the way that they have and continue finding more AWSes, or at some point, they need to realize, oh, there's the edge of the TAM, let's start generating a ton of cash, even though we've never known how to do that before.
如果你市值是 1.5 万亿美元，那就意味着你应该每年能产生 1000 亿美元左右的现金流——但我们从来没有见过他们做到过，甚至接近都没有。他们要么得继续按过去的方式运营，不断再创造出下一个 AWS，要么总有一天他们得意识到：“哦，TAM 的边界到了，我们该开始大规模盈利了”，即便他们过去从未真正学会如何做到这一点。
David: I think on the last episode, I said, if, but of course, when we had to interview Jeff Bezos, the question I really want to ask him is, is it still day one? Is it day two? Why did you retire? All that stuff.
大卫：我记得在上一集里我说过，如果——不，其实当然是当我们有机会采访杰夫·贝索斯时，我最想问他的问题就是：“现在还是‘第一天’吗？还是已经进入‘第二天’了？你为什么退休？等等这些问题。”
You raised an interesting point. Amazon, as a company, as a whole, is just sort of architected. Jeff would say, I told you guys all along, is architected to always be a day-one company. It needs to always keep growing.
你提出了一个很有趣的观点。亚马逊作为一个整体，是一种有特定架构的公司。杰夫会说，“我早就告诉你们了”，这家公司从架构上就是要永远保持“第一天”的状态。它必须不断增长。
Ben: Yes. At some point, that bumps up against the GDP of the world. You can't actually do that indefinitely, unless the GDP of the world keeps growing at a faster rate than Amazon's growth, which is definitely not true. Amazon's a much higher growth company than the world's GDP.
本：对。但总有一天，这种增长会碰到全球 GDP 的上限。你不可能无限期地增长，除非全球 GDP 的增长速度超过亚马逊的增速，而这显然是不现实的。亚马逊的增长远远高于全球 GDP 的增长。
At some point, a billion years from now, we're all dead, and the earth gets absorbed by the sun anyway, so don't project out this far. But I am curious, if you held Amazon indefinitely until the company no longer existed, which it will at some point, will you actually realize \$1½ trillion of value?
总有一天，几十亿年后，我们都会死去，地球也会被太阳吞噬，所以也没必要预测那么远。但我还是很好奇，如果你无限期地持有亚马逊股票，直到这家公司最终不复存在——而这一天终将到来——你真的能够实现这 1.5 万亿美元的价值吗？
David: Yeah, that's a good point. Maybe this is part of Jeff stepping back and Andy Jassy becoming CEO of the whole company.
大卫：对，这是个好问题。或许这正是杰夫退居二线、由安迪·贾西接任整个公司 CEO 的一部分原因。
Ben: It's to actually figure out how to do that.
本：就是为了真的去解决这个问题。
David: Yeah. I can imagine that that's a challenge that I'm totally projecting here into Jeff Bezos' mind. It's always a dangerous thing to do, in part, because it's so much more expansive than anybody who would try to project into it. I bet that's not something he's personally very interested in figuring out.
大卫：是的。我可以想象这是个巨大的挑战——当然我这是在大胆揣测贝索斯的想法。这样做总是危险的，因为他的思维广度远超任何试图去揣测他的人。我猜，这并不是他个人特别感兴趣去解决的问题。
Ben: Right. I think it's a great point. I mean, I think in the 12 months leading up to June of 2020, they generated \$27 billion of free cash flow. They know how to generate cash.
本：对，我也觉得这是个很好的观点。我的意思是，截止到 2020 年 6 月的过去 12 个月里，他们产生了 270 亿美元的自由现金流。他们知道该怎么赚钱。
I thought they were on the path starting (I think) in 2015–2016 is when they really started actually becoming free cash flow positive and growing that year over a year. That just stopped when the pandemic hit. Maybe we're in some temporary anomaly that they'll go back to the 2019 mode here shortly, or maybe the anomaly was the last five years before Covid.
我本以为他们从 2015 或 2016 年开始就走上了正向自由现金流的轨道，并且每年都有增长。但这一切在疫情袭来时就戛然而止。也许现在只是个短暂的异常阶段，很快他们就会回到 2019 年那种模式；也可能反过来，真正的“异常”其实是新冠前的那五年。
David: Andy, I think, has said on recent earnings calls, hey, we're going to be moving back towards profitability. We know how to do this. Don't freak out.
大卫：安迪在最近的财报电话会议上说过，我们会重新朝着盈利的方向走。我们知道该怎么做，大家别慌。
Ben: Yeah. That's the exact opposite message of what Jeff Bezos said in the 2020 letter when Covid hit.
本：对。这跟贝索斯在 2020 年疫情刚爆发时写给股东信里的话完全相反。
David: Didn't he say buckle your seatbelt?
大卫：他当时不是说“请系好安全带”吗？
Ben: Yeah. He said, if you're a share owner in Amazon, you may want to take a seat.
本：对，他说：“如果你是亚马逊的股东，可能需要坐下来准备好。”【暗指要应对剧烈波动】
David: Great.
大卫：精彩。
Ben: Yup.
本：嗯。
David: He's such a cowboy. Like we talked about, he wears the cowboy boots.
大卫：他真像个牛仔，就像我们说的，他还穿牛仔靴。
Ben: Truly. Anyway, that's a thought experiment exercise. To actually grade it, it was an activity of new market creation that just completely worked and invented one of the biggest markets of all time, and then became the leader in that, and managed to have no competition for the first five years, and then stave off everyone coming after them pretty sickly, permanently. They own just little enough of this market that it's not a regulatory concern. if they owned 80% of cloud, it probably would be worse for them, long-term.
本：真的。总之，这只是一个思想实验。如果要真正评分，这是一项全新的市场创造行为，而且完全成功了，还催生了有史以来最大的市场之一。然后他们成为了这个市场的领导者，在前五年几乎没有任何竞争，之后又成功抵御了所有后来者的挑战——而且是以一种近乎永久性的方式。他们所占的市场份额刚好少到不会引起监管关注。如果他们拥有云计算市场的 80%，从长期来看对他们反而可能是坏事。
David: Here's the question. Was Amazon strategic in letting Microsoft back in the game?
大卫：那问题来了，亚马逊是否有意让微软重新进入这场游戏？
Ben: No, I don't think so. I think that's too difficult of a future to see to cannibalize current day.
本：不，我不这么认为。我觉得为了防止未来可能的监管压力而牺牲当前利润太难预判，也不现实。
David: I'm sure they're worried about antitrust and regulation.
大卫：我敢肯定他们还是会担心反垄断和监管问题的。
Ben: Yeah. It's the same way that Google looks at Bing, I'm sure, which is like, thank God that exists.
本：是啊，就像谷歌看待必应一样——他们心里可能会说，“谢天谢地还有它的存在。”
David: All right, what's your grade?
大卫：好吧，你的评分是多少？
Ben: It's an A+, but grading is a silly exercise. I almost want to cut it from these types of episodes. I do think the interesting question is that I do want to continue to ponder for a while is, if you held Amazon ad infinitum and you own 100% of the company, would you ever be profitable on your business to buy it for \$1½ trillion?
本：A+，但打分这件事本身其实挺无聊的，我甚至想把这部分从这类节目里删掉。我觉得真正有趣的问题是，我还会持续思考很久的是——如果你无限期持有亚马逊，而且拥有这家公司 100% 的股权，那么用 1.5 万亿美元买下它是否最终真的能带来盈利？
David: It's the Warren Buffett, Ben Graham, a stock is a piece of a business. If you were able to buy the whole company of amazon.com for \$1.5 trillion, is that a good use of capital?
大卫：这是沃伦·巴菲特和本杰明·格雷厄姆的观点——股票代表的是一部分企业。如果你能以 1.5 万亿美元的价格买下整个 amazon.com，这是一笔划算的资本支出吗？
Ben: Yeah, it's a great question.
本：是的，这是个很棒的问题。
David: I think it probably is.
大卫：我觉得很可能是的。
Ben: That's where I thought you're going.
本：我就知道你会这么说。
David: I'm a little biased here, but come on. Yeah, A+ for me. Get out of here. This division of this company has \$100 billion of contracted revenue. A+, we're done.
大卫：我这可能有点偏颇，但拜托，这个业务部门就有 1000 亿美元的合同收入。A+，结束讨论。
Ben: David thinks the stock's cheap.
本：大卫觉得这只股票现在便宜得很。
David: Yeah. Carveouts, what do you got?
大卫：是啊。那我们来说说推荐环节吧，你有什么推荐？
Ben: Yes, carveouts. Mine is a very enjoyable show that I watch on Disney+ is a Marvel show called Moon Knight. I would say it's not the best show that I've seen on Disney+, but it is the best acting that I have seen in any of the Marvel Cinematic Universe shows.
本：好的，我的推荐是我最近在 Disney+ 上看的一部很有意思的剧，是漫威的《月光骑士》。我不会说这是我在 Disney+ 上看过最好的剧集，但它是我在整个漫威电影宇宙系列中看到演技最出色的一部。
David: Ah, nice.
大卫：啊，不错。
Ben: I still think Loki is probably the best written, and what was the one with the Scarlet Witch?
本：我仍然认为《洛基》可能是写得最好的剧，还有那个关于绯红女巫的叫什么来着？
David: Oh, Wanda Vision.
大卫：哦，《旺达幻视》。
Ben: Wanda Vision, also very good.
本：《旺达幻视》也非常不错。
David: That was good.
大卫：那部剧的确很好。
Ben: Fantastic writing. I would say this is almost to those calibers, but definitely a notch below. Oscar Isaac playing the lead role is some of the best acting I've seen in any TV or movie ever. The writing is entertaining enough where you can just sit there and enjoy his performance in a way that feels Broadway-level theatrical. I did not appreciate him as an actor until this.
本：剧本写得非常棒。我会说这部《月光骑士》几乎达到了《洛基》和《旺达幻视》的水准，但还是稍微差一点。奥斯卡·伊萨克在里面的主演表现是我在任何电视剧或电影中看到的最出色的演技之一。剧本足够有趣，你可以完全沉浸其中，欣赏他的表演，感觉就像百老汇级别的戏剧表现力。在看这部剧之前，我其实并没有那么欣赏他作为演员的能力。
David: Wait, is he...
大卫：等等，他是……
Ben: Poe Dameron.
本：波·达默龙。
David: Yeah, that's what I was going to say. I was like, he's done other Disney Star Wars stuff.
大卫：对，我正想说呢。他也演过迪士尼的《星球大战》系列啊。
Ben: He's also done some other crazy roles. I think he's in Ex Machina.
本：他还演过其他一些很疯狂的角色。我记得他演过《机械姬》。
David: Ah. Have you watched any of the new Star Wars stuff?
大卫：啊。那你有看新的《星球大战》系列吗？
Ben: I just finished Obi Wan Kenobi and was deeply unenthused.
本：我刚看完《欧比旺·肯诺比》，看得有点提不起劲。
David: Ah, bummer.
大卫：啊，那挺遗憾的。
Ben: I enjoyed it as a Star Wars fan. Just more Star Wars is awesome. Getting to see Obi Wan in different age is awesome, but I think they took away from the gravitas of his character, I guess. Okay, spoiler alert. Please stop this if you've not seen Obi Wan Kenobi yet. It's going to be spoilery, where I'm not going to tell you the end of the series, but I'm going to tell you what the series is about.
本：作为《星战》粉丝，我还是挺开心的。多一些《星战》的内容总是好的。看到不同年龄段的欧比旺也很棒，但我觉得他们削弱了这个角色的庄严感。好了，剧透警告。如果你还没看《欧比旺·肯诺比》，请跳过下面内容。我不会说结局，但我会讲讲这部剧的设定。
It's about the period of time between when he arrives on Tatooine at the end of episode three, but before A New Hope. In A New Hope, there's all this great gravitas given this idea that like, wow, he came here and he's been living in a cave, marooned and away from all this stuff forever since we last saw him.
故事讲的是他在第三部结束后来到塔图因这段时间，到《新希望》之前的那段空档期。在《新希望》里，大家对欧比旺赋予了很高的敬意，觉得哇，他当年来到这儿后就隐居在山洞里，远离一切，一直与世隔绝，直到卢克再次找到他。
David: Yeah, he's the old hermit Ben, right?
大卫：对啊，他就是那个隐居的“老本”嘛，对吧？
Ben: Right. He brings Luke to Tatooine and then that's his responsibility. This is a whole galactic adventure that takes place...
本：对。他把卢克带到塔图因，并视为自己的责任。结果剧里却安排了一场横跨银河的冒险……
David: He's like Han Solo.
大卫：感觉他都变成汉·索罗了。
Ben: Where he leaves Tatooine and comes back—I won't spoil things too much—with very, very major characters, where Obi Wan has interactions with them and big material fights that totally would change the character dynamic and the level of import put on his character on Tatooine in a way where it feels like it cheapened the canon to date by this existing.
本：他离开塔图因又回来——我不会剧透太多——在这个过程中和一些非常重要的角色互动，还有一些重大的战斗，这些情节本应极大改变他这个角色在塔图因的地位和形象，结果却让原本的正典设定显得有些廉价，像是被削弱了。
David: I have not watched any of the new stuff, but I feel like Lucasfilm just needs a new start. It doesn't feel like it's going in a good direction.
大卫：我还没看新剧，但我感觉卢卡斯影业确实需要一个全新的开始。目前的发展方向不太妙。
Ben: The IP also doesn't really lend itself well to serials. I don't know. Maybe that's not true. I did really like the Mandalorian. I liked when Boba Fett tried to become the Mandalorian by being like, ooh, Boba Fett is not that good. Let's just make it the Mandalorian again.
本：这个IP本身可能也不太适合做成剧集。我不确定，也许不是这样。我挺喜欢《曼达洛人》的。我觉得当《波巴·费特之书》尝试变回《曼达洛人》、仿佛在说“呃，波巴·费特其实没那么行，不如我们还是拍曼达洛人吧”时，我反而觉得挺有趣的。
David: That could be a deficit for another day.
大卫：这个话题以后可以单独聊聊。
Ben: Moon Knight, Oscar Isaac, go watch it.
本：《月光骑士》，奥斯卡·伊萨克，值得一看。
David: Awesome. My carveout is one that if you are listening to this now, I'm pretty sure you're gonna love this. I have a high degree of confidence in the affinity overlap between people listening right now and the carve out that I'm about to say, which is Lex Fridman's 5½-hour interview with John Carmack. It's so good.
大卫：太棒了。我的推荐如果你现在正在听这一期节目，我几乎可以确定你会喜欢我接下来要说的内容。我非常有信心你们的兴趣和这个内容会高度重合，那就是 Lex Fridman 和 John Carmack 的五个半小时访谈。真的太棒了。
Ben: It's awesome.
本：超级棒。
David: Carmack is just a legend.
大卫：Carmack 简直是个传奇人物。
Ben: I'm an hour in and it's great.
本：我才听了一个小时，但已经觉得很精彩了。
David: It's so, so good. Not knowing that that was coming, having just recently listened to the audiobook of Masters of Doom.
大卫：真的太棒了。我完全不知道会有这个访谈，正好我最近刚听完《毁灭战士之父》（Masters of Doom）的有声书。
Ben: It was made for you. It's perfect.
本：这简直就是为你量身打造的，太完美了。
David: I'm just in heaven. Reading Masters of Doom and now listening to this episode, this interview with Carmack makes me actually want to go either talk to or find out more from John Romero, how he thinks about things, and his history of id.
大卫：我简直如痴如醉。读完《毁灭战士之父》，再听这个访谈，我真的很想去和 John Romero 聊一聊，看看他是怎么想事情的，了解一下他和 id Software 的历史。
Carmack actually says In the beginning of the interview with Lex, John Romero is better at talking about the history of id and being the keeper of that than I am. They have a nice moment. I'm halfway through the interview with Lex where he talks about the relationship with Romero, became super strained, and then blew up. When id blew up, I think they've reconciled and it's nice.
Carmack 在访谈一开始就说，John Romero 比他更擅长讲述 id Software 的历史，也更像这段历史的守护者。他们在节目里还有一个很温馨的片段。我现在听到访谈的中段，Carmack 谈到了他和 Romero 的关系曾经非常紧张，最后彻底破裂，正是 id 解体的时候。不过现在他们好像和解了，挺让人欣慰的。
Anyway, the whole thing, Carmack is just one of those people that operates on a different level than most of humanity, at least in the technical realm. It's very interesting that he did VR, he was at Oculus, and part of Facebook and Meta. The thing that he's working on now is AI. In particular, artificial general intelligence. That's a great interview.
总之，整个访谈让人叹为观止。Carmack 是那种在技术领域完全超越常人的人。他曾经做过虚拟现实，在 Oculus 任职，后来又在 Facebook 和 Meta。他现在专注的项目是人工智能，尤其是通用人工智能（AGI）。这真的是一场精彩的访谈。
Ben: Sweet. Can't wait to finish it. All right, listeners.
本：太棒了。等不及要听完了。好啦，听众朋友们。
After you finish this episode, come discuss it with all of us, 13,000 strong now, in the Acquired Slack community at acquire.fm/slack. Pick yourself up a sweet shirt, tank, hoodie, crewneck, or onesie at acquired.fm/store.
听完这一期节目后，欢迎加入我们已有一万三千人的 Acquired Slack 社群，在 acquire.fm/slack 和我们一起讨论吧。你也可以在 acquired.fm/store 买一件超赞的 T 恤、背心、帽衫、圆领衫，甚至是连体衣！
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你也完全可以成为 Acquired 的 LP，提前收听我们的 LP 节目，地址是 acquired.fm/lp，或者等节目公开发布后再听也行。只要在你喜欢的播客应用里搜索 Acquired LP Show 就能找到。
Our latest episode will be live there soon with Nat Manning of Kindergarten Venture's fame and of Kettle as well. Honestly, reinsurance is fascinating, and I never would have thought I would have said that.
我们最新一集节目马上就会上线，嘉宾是 Kindergarten Ventures 的 Nat Manning，他也是 Kettle 的一员。说真的，"再保险" 这个话题居然能这么有趣，我自己都没想到我会这么说。
David: As is enterprise IT infrastructure.
大卫：企业级 IT 基础设施也是一样。
Ben: Amen. All right, listeners, have a good one. See you next time.
本：阿门。好了，听众们，祝你们愉快，我们下次再见。
David: We'll see you next time.
大卫：下次见。
Note: Acquired hosts and guests may hold assets discussed in this episode. This podcast is not investment advice, and is intended for informational and entertainment purposes only. You should do your own research and make your own independent decisions when considering any financial transactions.
注意：Acquired 的主持人和嘉宾可能持有本期节目中讨论的资产。本播客不构成投资建议，仅供信息和娱乐用途。在做出任何财务决策前，你应当自行研究并做出独立判断。