Jeff Bezos Suggests Outsourcing Least Important 70%; A Boost for Rails?

by Peter Cooper on Oct 02, 2006 |

In a speech at the 2006 MIT Emerging Technologies Conference, Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon.com, has pointed out that 70% of the time spent on a project is spent on inconsequential tasks that don't differentiate that project from any other. Bezos calls these features "muck" and suggests developers could outsource their implementation to third parties or technologies, much in the same way business owners outsource generic tasks like accounting, finance, and legal services.

In an overview for Artima Developer, Frank Sommers looks at Bezo's observations and suggests that Rails is an ideal tool for reducing the level of "muck" in a project, along with technologies such as Amazon's S3 storage API. With Jeff Bezos' recent investment in Rails-founders 37signals, a company that strongly believes in focusing on differentiation from competitors (mostly by providing a simple, user-friendly service) it seems Bezos is putting his money where his mouth is.

Related Editorial

Infographic: Just How Big is the Nerd Economy

Building Content-Driven Apps - Couchbase and Elasticsearch for Content and Metadata Stores

Making the Shift from Relational to NoSQL

Beyond HTML5 and Native Development: Build Richer, More Functional Mobile Applications

Why NoSQL - Three Trends Disrupting the Database Status Quo

Related Sponsor

Get code level visibility into your web apps. All for free.

Try New Relic Today.

Hello stranger!

You need to Register an InfoQ account or to post comments. But there's so much more behind being registered.

Get the most out of the InfoQ experience.

Tell us what you think

Community comments

What does this have to do with Rails? by Jason Carreira Posted

Re: What does this have to do with Rails? by Pat Eyler Posted

Re: What does this have to do with Rails? by Jason Carreira Posted

Bezos didn't even mention Ruby by myke myers Posted

Headline is ... by ashok shetty Posted

What does this have to do with Rails? by Jason Carreira

Sure, he mentioned Rails, but there's plenty of pre-built infrastructure out there for Java... More than Ruby, in fact, especially if you want to build enterprise systems that do real work...

Re: What does this have to do with Rails? by Pat Eyler

Except that Amazon already uses plenty of Java inside. Bezos knows that, knows what Java is good (and not so good) for, and he's still suggesing that RoR is a good solution for the 70% of the 'muck'.

Re: What does this have to do with Rails? by Jason Carreira

Looking back, it wasn't Bezos who suggested RoR was a good fit, it was Frank Sommers from Artima. Bezos was probably positioning the web services Amazon provides (like S3) as that outsourced infrastructure.

I still say in terms of real enterprise infrastructure, Java is in a much better position to provide the muck.

Bezos didn't even mention Ruby by myke myers

Some other guy did.
Yea, outsource your crap to somebody else to do. This is really big news to people?

Frankly - i'm getting sick and tired of hearing about how Ruby should be used for everything short of making coffee in the morning (and some people argue it would do a better job for that!).

Look at where you are today, look at where you want to go tomorrow and the day after, and pick the best tool to get yourself there. Period.

Headline is ... by ashok shetty

.. really lame. Desperate stuff like this is what gives a nice technology a bad name.