This strikes me as one of those great, marginal innovations that you need a giant corporation to implement. How many manufacturers are going to change their packaging line for a startup?

Congratulations, Amazon. Way to use your size for good.

It's also a very clever framing the question in a leading way. Let's try framing it in another way:

Let's say you're a business decision maker, and you got yourself on this cloud computing kick. Who would you rather buy your cloud resources from?

1. A company who built its entire business on the high availability of its international network of online transaction engines, 2. A company which has built its business on indexing, and processing one of the biggest data stores in the world, and which has also built and run the world's most popular Internet-based productivity tools. 3. A company whose business relies om shipping a PC operating systems and which also supplies a word processor. "

I'm not saying that my framing is any less biased, just that there is more than one way to view these things.

1 million users. Profitable.

ok, you had me until the last paragraph at which point you stuffed in your love for McCain ("place him among the best of any living politician") without providing anything to back that up. Precisely what "actions" over the last 8 years would you point to that prove McCain so "open-minded"? And yes, I do mean over the last 8 years. I am a "what have you done for me lately" kind of guy.

Torvolds' blog post is well written. Most none of us gets to meet the people we vote for in person. We have to settle for what we feel and perceive. It is not black and white.

I think this is brilliant on Amazon's part. The frustration factor in opening some items (children's toys, for instance) shouldn't be underestimated.

Torvalds makes the same mistake that many other people make when evaluating politicians - he takes them at face value. If being reasonable and open-minded were qualities that were highly valued by voters, then politicians would hire coaches to help them practice seeming reasonable and open-minded.

In fact, this is one of the things that concerns me most about Obama. I too like the fact that he sounds like a reasonable man in interviews and he seems to value his opponents' aguments. But his voting record shows none of that. By his words, he is a deeply thoughtful man. By his actions, he is a hyper-partisan.

George Bush has taught me to evaluate politicians by their actions, not their words. Ironically, if being open-minded were your highest priority for a politician, then John McCain's actions (though not his words) would place him among the best of any living politician.

There are a handful of companies in YC (aside from my own) that I would love to personally invest in (if I were in the position to invest). Weebly is definitely near the top of the list, and was from the first moment I saw it during Winter '07. They're totally pragmatic, and just get things done...not one information astronaut in the bunch.

And they work in that space where nobody wants to be: technology for newbies. A couple of folks in this thread are criticizing Weebly for the very things that make it so explosively successful. I'd advise anyone who thinks they're smarter than the Weebly folks to pause for a moment, and think about traffic, and what it means for there to be 1 million websites at Weebly. That's one million occasions where someone browsed to the site, filled out the form, and went through the process of creating a website. How many people have signed up for your web application? How many made it to actually using it to do real work? And how much money does your app make if you imagine 1% of those users being willing to pay you a monthly fee? When the number of people committed enough to create something with your site reaches a million, you almost can't not make money with it.

You can swap the last two if you prefer.

Understandable, but perhaps you could include it in your FAQs?

How much, the number one FAQ the world over for the last 5,000 years :)

I'm not yet convinced that the hard work ever pays off, it just begets more hard work ;)

It's like, if you have 2 apples and eat 1, how many apples do you have? Normal life? One apple. Start-up life? 17 apples. Want to know what happens when you eat another one? No. No you do not.

... Just make sure you really like apples.

My experience, while obviously not universally true, is that "release early, release often" is critical to web applications.

One big mistake we made at Powerset was to keep everything secret and fuel the hype machine. I think that in the end this was harmful to the company image. It would have been better to get the tool out in front of people, show them what we could do, and let them see the progress. That way you can get people behind you, cheering you on, instead of having them get bored with all the unproven claims you keep making.

Ideas are cheap. Implementations are what make or break a business.