I also worked for Amazon for not far from a decade, and I don't think Colin's misunderstanding anything. His commentary on Ownership, as I read it, is that he would like to see Amazon take a broader tech-ecosystem role and act as steward/referee/high-standard-insister in order to help make the entire Internet better. AWS is particularly well-placed for this because its mission is to give the people what they want in exchange for money, rather than to sell the people to other people or radicalize grandma for clicks, so it doesn't have some of the suspicious ethical positions that burden other places in the space.

I think he's completely correct, but I also think that AWS and Amazon are currently in a retrenching/cost-eliminating reactive mode, are trying to triage and assess the impact of (waves hands vaguely) all this, and are not currently thinking too hard about taking on new non-monetizable strategic leadership initiatives.

As far as Amazon's siloing goes -- it's not great, but it starts to look positively nonexistent when you consider the knives-out political infighting of its competitors. At Amazon I was frequently in coopetition with other teams that drew from the same budget pool as mine, and some of them (not to their credit) would use any means necessary to empire build. On the positive side, that kind of behavior was unusual, and I, and many other managers in my experience, happily gave up ownership and readjusted plans when it was clearly in the best interests of the business and eventually the customer.

It may look from the outside that there are many 'silos' owing to Amazon's deep parallelized structure -- consider each individual team working to deliver an AWS service, for example -- and it's definitely true that some of the older Amazonian mechanisms for synchronizing team goals and ensuring leadership coherence have decayed over time -- but generally the teams do roll up in a sensible way and are reviewed together in a sensible way, and alignment is generally better inside AWS/Amazon than any peer.