The “API Mandate” memo at Amazon
How far does this principle scale? I've heard of this strategy and thought "that's kinda cool." Amazon is obviously successful in its domain, so it would be easy to assume some causality.<p>And yet, there's another big tech company, fruit symbol I think, that has played the long game of continually fine tuning the interaction points to make the integration of their parts more than the whole. They get credit for attention to detail, leveraging their integration and their ability to move in ways they do because of their thorough integration across their whole hardware/software stack. They've recently been in the press because of just how much they were able to tune their integration to the problem with their first desktop computing chip. Again, we credit their success with some causality due to this strategy, which (to me) is very different than the Amazon strategy.<p>Is it because Amazon is a cloud company and Apple is a hardware company that they have these different approaches to product development and each enjoy success? Or at the end of the day, are these "do it this way" less responsible than we'd like to believe?