Werner Vogels, CTO, Amazon:
[T]hey appear shocked that we used a critical voice to address their work. Welcome to life at Amazon, [where] we set a very high bar for our own works and we expect anyone that comes to sell us an approach to actually be prepared to really defend their ideas…. [Y]ou [had] better be prepared to defend your ideas with very strong arguments and hard evidence. We expect that from anyone, externally or internally, who wants to promote an idea within Amazon.
It sounds like he really means “You’d better be prepared to defend ideas we’d already decided we don’t like.” How many standards-compliant redesigns of Amazon.com does it take before the provable accessibility improvements, bandwidth savings, and browser compatibility cause you to actually do something? Your tag-soup site is significantly unchanged from its earliest days, and one of your affiliates has already gotten its arse sued.
Why should we believe your exhortations of requiring solid evidence when your company has done nothing but ignore such evidence, much of it published for free? If you’re so interested in facts, why aren’t you interested in these facts? Is it because Amazon is unwilling to admit it’s pulled in billions by doing Web sites exactly the wrong way?