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But it was clear that more and more companies would develop or acquire these capabilities, and they eventually would become an undifferentiated commodity. That is exactly what happened. Today, building the capability to store and retrieve millions of photos could well be a homework assignment for a college student taking a computer science class. In several of the Working Backwards documents for the early AWS products, the PR/FAQ stated that we wanted the student in a dorm room to have access to the same world-class computing infrastructure as any Amazon software engineer. That powerful metaphor in the PR/FAQ document really helped crystallize the thoughts and ideas of the AWS product development teams. There were a number of factors that influenced Amazon’s decision to start the foray into web services that would ultimately become AWS. We had several proofs of concept in the Amazon Product API and the Amazon Seller API demonstrating that the area was worthy of attention. It was simply a better way to build software than the traditional methods used at that time. There was a relatively clear roadmap on what was needed since the software building blocks were known, but hadn’t yet been offered as web services. We also knew our unique capabilities would not be unique for very long, which provided a sense of urgency. (The first company to offer a robust set of general-purpose web services wouldn’t be guaranteed to win in the long run, but the head start sure would help.) That sense of urgency is codified in Amazon’s Bias for Action leadership principle. It states, “Speed matters in business. Many decisions and actions are reversible and do not need extensive study. We value calculated risk-taking.”
Working Backwards
Colin Bryar and Bill Carr
Whatever small doubts they might have harbored over RKO’s prospective publicity efforts, however, the Disneys had a much greater issue with their new distributor—one they almost seemed afraid to broach. As naïve as it may have sounded after their nearly fifteen years in the film business, they had no idea what to charge exhibitors for the film and no idea what RKO’s return to them might be, which they fully realized made them vulnerable to RKO’s machinations. The larger studios typically sold their films in blocks, so their advice wouldn’t have been particularly helpful to a studio with only one feature to sell. What the Disneys needed was an independent producer to guide them, of which there were very few in Hollywood at the time. As it turned out, the knight who rode to their rescue was Walt’s old idol, Charlie Chaplin. Chaplin offered to give the Disneys all his “records and experience,” most importantly his ledgers from Modern Times, which permitted Roy to press RKO to “go out and ask Chaplin prices” and to get the same terms in foreign markets as Chaplin had gotten. Thanking Chaplin after Snow White’s release, Walt called it an “invaluable service” and wrote, “Your records have been our Bible—without them, we would have been as sheep in a den of wolves.”
After all, just reducing junk food didn’t work. Junk food proved to be the exception to the “everything in moderation” slogan. More precisely, I learned how immediately the body’s metabolism was impaired with just a small amount of processed carbohydrate, or even a healthy product with added sugar. I forged ahead to better understand, and eventually the discipline reaped amazing results.
The Overfat Pandemic
Philip Maffetone
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