Amazon: SOA by CEO

Antonio's technology blog:

Years ago, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos decided that Service Oriented Architecture
will be good for Amazon. In the retrospect, he was absolutely right.
The legend says that his pragmatic solution was to send this email to all employees:

1. “All teams will henceforth expose their data and functionality through service interfaces
   
2. Teams must communicate with each other through these interfaces
   
3. There will be no other form of interprocess communication allowed: no direct linking, no direct reads of another team's data store, no shared-memory model, no back-doors whatsoever. The only communication allowed is via service interface calls over the network
   
4. It doesn't matter what [API protocol] technology you use.
   
5. Service interfaces, without exception, must be designed from the ground up to be externalizable.
   
6. That is to say, the team must plan and design to be able to expose the interface to developers in the outside world. No exceptions.
   
7. Anyone who doesn't do this will be fired.
   
8. Thank you; have a nice day!”
   

The story was also presented on SaaS class @ Coursera. There is also a related e-book. The story originated from Steve Yegge, a very opinionated and smart person who used to work in Amazon, and now it works in Google. Recently he criticized Google for not providing APIs for Google+...