Five years ago this week… Amazon Personalize, the company’s machine learning recommendation engine, was made available to AWS customers – popping the lid on technology which had long been an exclusive luxury of the retail platform itself. Faultline warned that AWS had sown the seed for cross-data applications and in doing so would remove value from each content recommendation served. We also suggested that the personalization software industry would either form a united front and fight against adoption of Amazon Personalize, or eventually succumb to Amazon’s idea that recommendations should be ubiquitous rather than siloed; complementary rather than competitive. That debate was settled two years down the line, when the world’s largest recommendations engine provider, ThinkAnalytics, revealed it had integrated Personalize into its…