The era of constant innovation at Amazon could be over • businessroundups.org

There was a time when AWS re:Invent, the annual customer extravaganza of Amazon’s cloud arm, was jam-packed with announcements. The innovation coming out of the company was so mind-boggling that it was hard to keep up with the flow of news.

But this year felt different. If last year was incremental, this year was downright slow when it came to meaningful news.

To give you an idea of ​​our coverage here at businessroundups.org last year, we wrote 28 stories about the event. This year there are only 18 left, including this one. It’s not that we wanted to write less – we just found out there was less relevant news to write about.

The day two keynote on AI and machine learning was all about incremental improvements to existing products. There were so few meaningful announcements that my colleague Frederic Lardinois wrote a post in pictures mocking the lack of news.

It seems like it’s gotten to the point where the ecosystem has grown so much and there are so many products that the company has decided to focus on making it easier to work with and between those products (or with third-party partner products) than things from create zero.

From a news perspective, that means there really is less to write about. Eight new SageMaker capabilities or five new database and analytics capabilitieswhich I’m sure are important to the people who needed these features, feel like moving forward with an already versatile range of products.

It’s no different than Microsoft Word over the years: it’s a fine word processor, so the only way to really improve it was to use new feature after new feature to make it relevant to an ever wider or more detailed audience.