New Phaistos

The tyrant of e-commerce Most of us know Amazon as the e-commerce giant. Anything you might want to buy starting from books to even medicine (!) these days can be found on the platform. Given my decision to boycott the company (for more, look at P.S. ), I can tell you that this complete dominance of the e-market has made my life difficult. There are many items that I can only exclusively find through Amazon and for the rest the price and convenience guarantees are simply great. But what if I told you that e-commerce is only a fraction of Amazon's profits. And no, I do not refer to other consumer facing Amazon products such as Amazon Prime or the smart home assistant Alexa. Instead, Amazon also has a very successful business to business product called Amazon Web Services or AWS. Internet roots and infrastructure realities To explain what AWS is and does, I think it is a better idea to go back in time a bit and share some context. You see, Amazon was one of the early adopters of inte...

Mechanics with mouse-pads When is the last time you went to the garage to get your car fixed? Well, no matter the type, I expect that apart from wrenches and overalls the mechanic also had a laptop with him. But why? What does a laptop have to do with cars? It turns out cars at this point are more computer than mechanical parts. We still drive our cars the same, but under the hood everything has changed. Take for example turning the wheel:  In a conventional car, the wheel itself is physically connected to the tires via an axle In modern, "computerized" cars the wheel is instead connected to a computer that interprets the driver's command and relays it to the tires accordingly This vehicle design philosophy, that pretty much applies to everything from cars, to spaceship and aircraft, is called Software Defined Vehicle or SDV. So where is my car's computer? The "softwareization" has been an ongoing process during the last years. Computers are very helpful mac...

Keys, Screen, Go Last week, I found myself in a car ride for a company trip. When I first received the keys to the vehicle our company had leased for us, I was happy to see a modern car with a large touch screen. Considering that we were going to a foreign country, having a map and GPS system would come in handy. However, the dominance of the screen quickly became a nuisance. At some point in the ride, a colleague complained of the air quality. She asked the driver to turn off the air re circulation, to get some fresh air in the cabin. The driver was unable to do so! All options were available through the menu ... yet navigating the user interface meant taking the eyes of the screen to search for the option buried under layers of menus. Wait, where is my button? That small moment forced me to reflect on my expectations as a car driver and passenger and the design assumptions baked into modern cars. Sure, a touch screen signals that the vehicle is up-to-date. It promises tech-savviness:...