Ha, ha! You 150-odd ex-Amazon folks here will of course realize immediately that #7 was a little joke I threw in, because Bezos most definitely does not give a shit about your day.
I thought the exact same thing reading this -- this sort of science fiction prototyping reminds me of the kind of Scenario Planning practiced initially by Royal Dutch Shell, GE, and various militaries. GBN had a big business doing futures work for Fortune 100 companies for quite some time. This kind of engagement is pretty high-end business strategy work, but can be very compelling to a leadership team or a board that is working on long-term planning.
Clearly articulated potential futures can help large companies identify signals that a particular future is coming to pass or plan responses should that scenario become true.
In a world where technology seems to be "disrupting" almost every industry, it makes sense to me that science fiction futures would be especially relevant.
I think this is a crucial distinction. Netflix has a relatively unique architecture for their content delivery system compared to other online video providers, which is worth considering in context of this article.
With Netflix's Open Connect (https://openconnect.netflix.com/en/) system, most residential Internet Service Providers have appliances at the regional point of interconnection. These appliances are inside of or directly connected to the ISP's network in the region. Back in 2016 they had appliances deployed to over 1,000 locations. Content is pre-positioned during off-peak hours to the appliances.
Previously Netflix has been open about how they use AWS for "generic, scalable computing" including "all of the logic of the application interface, the content discovery and selection experience, recommendation algorithms, transcoding, etc."
At the time, they claimed that one of the advantages of doing this was the ease of use and growing commoditization of the “cloud” market, so it makes sense that they are evaluating alternative cloud providers for these commodity services.
Here's a mirror of the original essay: https://gist.github.com/chitchcock/1281611
Ha, ha! You 150-odd ex-Amazon folks here will of course realize immediately that #7 was a little joke I threw in, because Bezos most definitely does not give a shit about your day.