The era of constant innovation at Amazon may be over

There was a time when AWS re:Invent, the annual customer extravaganza hosted by Amazon's cloud arm, was full of announcements. The innovation coming out of the company was so breathtaking that it was hard to keep up with the onslaught of news.

But this year was different. If last year was progressive, this year has been downright slow when it comes to meaningful news.

To give you an idea of ​​our coverage here at TechCrunch, last year we wrote 28 articles about the event. This year, there are only 18 left, including this one. It's not that we want to write less; we just found there was less relevant news to write about.

On day two, the AI ​​and machine learning keynote focused on incremental improvements to existing products. There have been so few significant announcements that my colleague Frédéric Lardinois wrote a post in pictures mocking the lack of news.

It's gotten to the point, it seems, where the ecosystem has grown so big, and there are so many products, that the company has decided to focus on making it easier to work with and between these products (or with an external product partner) than creating things from scratch.

From a news perspective, that means there's really less to write about. Eight new SageMaker features or five new database and analytics features, which I'm sure are important to people who needed these features, make it want to add to an already rich set of products in features.

It's not unlike Microsoft Word over the years: it's a perfectly capable word processor, so the only way to really improve it was to roll out one new feature after another to make it relevant for an ever larger or more specific audience.< /p>