In 2001, just 16 years ago, Microsoft was almost broken up because Internet Explorer was shipped with Windows. Think about that for a second, I'll wait.
Seems like small potatoes today, doesn't it?
When was the last time you've heard of anti trust litigation because iPhones come with Safari or a whole bunch of Apple services? What about Google and its software on any and all Android phones? And why can Amazon tie Kindle to its book store and not get sued by competitors?
We are allowing these companies to integrate vertically to the point of insanity.
When one takes at face value the extremely simplistic way you stated it, yes, it seems small. But that's not what happened. Microsoft was convicted of using their monopoly position in operating systems to extend their reach into web browsers. Practically speaking, the only consumer operating systems at the time ran on personal computers, either desktops or laptops, and in that market Microsoft held an overwhelming market share. There were no mass market smartphones (there was WinCE, but few I knew had them), Palm Pilots held the PDA market for a short while, but all a drop in the bucket compared to full-blown OSs.
When was the last time you've heard of anti trust litigation because iPhones come with Safari or a whole bunch of Apple services?
Go buy a turnkey Android phone if you don't like it.
What about Google and its software on any and all Android phones?
Go buy an iPhone if you don't like that.
And why can Amazon tie Kindle to its book store and not get sued by competitors?
Apple's iBooks has about everything you'll find on Amazon. Haven't used it, but I'd be surprised if Google Books wasn't close enough.
What were you going to buy computer-wise in 2001? A desktop or laptop that came with Microsoft Windows whether you wanted it or not. That was your practical choice, and the courts found that though it was fine for Microsoft to own the OS market, it was not fine to leverage that into driving Netscape out of business.
Microsoft had 97% market share in desktop PC's in 2000. If the iPhone had 97% market share, I bet you'd hear about a lot of anti trust cases against Apple.
That’s not the full story - I think you’re understating quite how much of a monopoly on operating systems Microsoft had. It was nearly broken up because of a consistent and recurrent abuse of its that position, which culminated in the Internet Explorer case.
With the exception of Google in the search market, None of the examples you cite are in monopoly market positions. Nobody will force Apple to allow other browsers on the iPhone, for example, because there are other mobile phones users can purchase if they require that feature.
Google (in the search market) is of course currently being examined by Europe for its possibly-anti-competitive practices. But these things take time.
Bundled Internet Explorer was particularly troubling because they were promoting ActiveX as the way to provide interactive content and otherwise extend the browser, and ActiveX was very closely tied to the Windows API (so that it would be impractical to make arbitrary ActiveX controls work on other operating systems).
I didn't follow the court case and I don't know if that was a central part of it, but if it wasn't it should have been.
It's easy to think, now that JavaScript has won, that ActiveX in browsers was never going to take off, but I think there was a real risk (and as I understand it in South Korea it did reach critical mass and effectively force everyone to have access to Internet Explorer for a decade and a half).
I don't think Google have done anything similar to that with Chrome.
> What about Google and its software on any and all Android phones?
And the biggest of all of them -- Google Chrome browser advertised on the Google Search FRONT page with link directly under the search box; a spot seen by billions of people that neither you nor your small business or even a corp with billions in revenue have access to!
It still blows my mind they never got in trouble for that.
I remember those times. You're missing a key element on how different the world was then.
90%+ of people used a Windows machine exclusively. By making IE the default & forcing OEMs to install it, they were using that that monopoly to crush Netscape.
Today's world is significantly more fragmented. People typically use at least two devices (a mobile device, in addition to a desktop or laptop). No single company controls the browser market the same way MS/IE did. Chrome has 54%[1], whereas IE had peaked at 95%[2].
every time the government actually does something like this, it is merely an instruction manual to every other massive corporation on the planet on how to technically do the same thing but more effectively.
Yes but none of Amazon, Apple nor Google have a monopoly on general computing the way Microsoft did in the 90s. They’re vertically integrated but the customer has options.
Much of Microsoft's historical behaviour was objectionable. Amazon, however, has been troubling on a much deeper level from the beginning.
Their attitude towards labour has been nothing short of Dickensian. I'm not speaking so much of their habit of writing dystopian employment contracts and turning to legal intimidation when employees leave, though that is also a problem, as I am of their treatment of lower paid staff. Refusing dock workers adequate rest, hydration or cooling is indefensible.
However impressive the accomplishments and intellect of Mr. Bezos may be, we can no longer hold any faith he or Amazon will bow to even minimal concerns of human decency. The only levers are the threat of financial and regulatory consequences. The further Amazon's power places them beyond such levers the more dangerous they become.
> The series revealed the lengths Amazon was prepared to go to keep costs down and output high and yielded a singular image of Amazon’s ruthlessness—ambulances stationed on hot days at the Amazon center to take employees suffering from heat stroke to the hospital. Despite the summer weather, there was no air-conditioning in the depot, and Amazon refused to let fresh air circulate by opening loading doors at either end of the depot—for fear of theft. Inside the plant there was no slackening of the pace, even as temperatures rose to more than 100 degrees.
> On June 2, 2011, a warehouse employee contacted the US Occupational Safety and Health Administration to report that the heat index had reached 102 degrees in the warehouse and that fifteen workers had collapsed. On June 10 OSHA received a message on its complaints hotline from an emergency room doctor at the Lehigh Valley Hospital: “I’d like to report an unsafe environment with an Amazon facility in Fogelsville. . . . Several patients have come in the last couple of days with heat related injuries.”
It's also worth adding that Amazon eventually did retrofit their facilities with cooling devices but only after their practices drew international media coverage.
Wonder how long they can go on like that. They tried to recruit me a few years ago but I ignored them because I didn't like what I has heard about them plus I didn't want to move to Seattle. After a few weeks I received an angry email demanding I explain my lack of response even though they initiated contact. I wonder if HQ2 isn't as much about finding a new talent pool that they haven't yet peed into as it is about swimming in the public treasury. I'm really curious what happens to them should there be a large reduction in work visas available. No doubt they'd open development centers around the globe but that's going to be a much different course of action than their apparent preference for handling software labor.
Is Amazon forcing us to install their products even if we don't use it, and crippling our OS if we try to remove it? No. Is Amazon taking control of small companies for their IP and then using it to sue competitors with frivolous lawsuits? (a la sco). Are they suing customers for using competing products? No, I don't think Amazon is doing these things.
That link only really gets into the fact that they have a large market share. That alone does't make them a 90s era Microsoft.
Amazon is far more dangerous than 1990s Microsoft. Amazon is:
- Using third party proxies to avoid accountability for sale of countfeit products, and liability for the same.
- Using its market position and sock puppet partners to replicate and promote knockoff products.
- Using its domination of book market share to bully book publishers into a accepting its terms, and capriciously raising prices and removing pre-order options to those the tow the line. (Hachette)
- Notorious for poor working conditions, for both blue collar and white collar workforces.
I could go on, at length.
Amazon doesn’t force you to use your products, it instead raises the cost of everything you buy by owning the wholesale and distribution channels. Their UPS rates are the price floor. Their predatory tactics allow them to avoid collection of sales and use taxes — pushing them to the consumer. Their wholesale pricing is a price floor in many categories, or shared with WalMart.
Amazon is a monopolist and negative force in the American economy. They exist with their current business practices because the US courts changed their interpretation of what a monopoly is, which is now strictly determined by how corporate actions impact consumer retail prices.
Amazon Stores doesn't sell competitor products. Try buying Google Home on Amazon.
Whats worse? Searching for Google Home returns results for Amazon Echo.
You can find amazon apps on Google PlayStore though.
Under your criteria (which I agree with) Facebook and or Google would be a better fit. The problem is that those blog posts have already been written to death.
>Is Amazon forcing us to install their products even if we don't use it, and crippling our OS if we try to remove it? No
Is any thing in an analogy the same as the thing it points to? No. That's the very idea behind an analogy: that it points to something being alike between two entities, not about them being/doing same exact things (which wouldn't need an analogy) or totally unlike things (for which one wouldn't make sense).
In this case, what Cringely wants you to think/see is not that Amazon "bundles it browser" or "sues Linux a la Sco", but how it's a huge monopoly, it uses its power as leverage, and it screws the little guys.
Vendor lock-in is a pretty powerful tool. They may not be forcing anyone to "install" their systems into AWS, but once they're installed, they're too difficult to "uninstall." A fundamental requirement of free markets is for customers to be able to leave incumbents for new companies with fresher products that present a better value - if customers de-facto can't leave AWS, then AWS has monopoly power over those customers.
Last time I checked Amazon didn't remove the headphone jack from my phone or my USB-A port from my new laptop either. Doesn't get any more evil than that, really.
I alternate between being a real fan of Bezos and concern about the company's sprawling and growing power/interests.
Jeff Bezos is a true visionary, brilliant, and absolutely should be rewarded for that. We need more folks like him.
On the other hand, at what point has Amazon won enough? Selling things at a loss to drive competitors out of business verticals is surely bad for the consumer in the long-term no?
The guy has a business track record surpassing most, I will give you that -- however, I don't think this kind of idolatry is helpful to anyone, least of all yourself.
Interesting that you ascribe all good intentions to Bezos and all ill intentions to Amazon. How do you know that "Amazon's" growing power interests are not Bezos'?
>Jeff Bezos is a true visionary, brilliant, and absolutely should be rewarded for that. We need more folks like him.
More folks doing the obvious (building an online everything-store) and driving it to a monopoly?
I'd rather we'd have several big online stores.
As for the other ventures Amazon is in, not impressed. I'd rather we'd have more in-company expertise, than a huge IaaS shop (whose price for convenience is central control, loss of privacy, and inflated costs that trickle to the consumers).
> Jeff Bezos is a true visionary, brilliant, and absolutely should be rewarded for that. We need more folks like him.
That's probably true of any billion dollar company founder, not to mention the (more than) trillion dollar Amazon.
> at what point has Amazon won enough? Selling things at a loss to drive competitors out of business verticals is surely bad for the consumer in the long-term no?
What do you mean by "enough"? Amazon is a public for-profit company and such companies are always looking for ways to improve their bottom line. If they see a dollar they can earn, they owe it to their shareholders to do everything they can to earn it.
If Amazon can improve its bottom line by driving competitors out, then that's what it'll do. It's naive to think that the good of the consumer is of any relevance.
>Selling things at a loss to drive competitors out of business verticals is surely bad for the consumer in the long-term no?
Not necessarily.
1. They can find efficiencies of scale in the system from operating in such large scale and vertical integration. Then its not bad for the customer.
2.If they have to raise prices when competition is out of business, competition will come back in sooner or later. So maybe its bad for customer in short term.
The article assertion is very big in computing = Microsoft of the 90s. I can be wrong but there have not been any anti-competition steps taken at AWS yet.
AWS has been light years ahead when it came to cloud computing and now they are having the first mover advantage and the dominant position. But will it last very long? It is very hard to say, over the years companies which were thought infallible have gone down.
tl;dr - Amazon is coming Bad Microsoft... because AWS is a monopoly. And a whole lot of things that don't make sense.
It might just be too early in the morning for me.
> Part of the reason AWS is gaining market share is because Microsoft’s Azure doesn’t boot virtual machines quite as fast.
Somehow I doubt the gap between virtual machine boot time (and this is mostly applicable only to EC2 vs. Azure Virtual Machines) is worth calling out. It might be due to existing developer buy-in and familiarity with AWS in addition to the continual investment in new services and price matching.
Why would I switch to Azure when AWS exceeds its offering and is priced just as competitively? These are complex platforms with real lock-in. Switching from AWS to anything else requires a substantial investment in learning new tools, technologies and best practices. So far AWS has made it so there's never been a compelling reason for most users.
> ... This too shall pass, but Microsoft will still be smaller. That’s why Redmond has staked out the Enterprise cloud market — alas, the segment most sensitive to such slow boot times.
On-premise cloud and enterprise customers care about virtual machine boot times that much huh? I'd love an example or some citation.
> AWS supports most startups as well as all 17 US intelligence agencies — taking 350,000 PCs out of places like the CIA, Thank Edward Snowden for that one. They are enjoying great success, though AWS partners aren’t enjoying themselves quite as much. Put simply, AWS is a pain to deal with if you are a customer big enough to be in personal communication and not just a credit card number. This, too, is like the old Microsoft.
Anything at all to backup these sentences? I'm not sure they belong together. How does the CIA moving to AWs connect with AWS being a pain to deal with if you're a big customer?
> Tech companies behave this way because most employees are young and haven’t worked anywhere else and because the behavior reflects the character of the founder. If the boss tells you to beat up customers and partners and it’s your first job out of college, then you beat up customers and partners because that’s the only world you know.
These two paragraphs are particularly ... cringely. Jeff Bezos in the vest with the muscular arms is imprinting on these young minds that they can treat customers and partners badly. I think. Somehow.
Why is AWS so dominant and, surprisingly to me at least, gaining on the competition?
Google Cloud seems quite neat and in the same price range. OVH is much cheaper and uses OpenStack. Businesses in the Microsoft sphere should buy Azure quite easily. And there are many smaller, specialized providers for various needs.
Amazon's lead should be eroding not consolidating. Is it just that they were first and everyone standardised on their tools? Devops people choosing AWS on autopilot because it's what they know works?
BTW this has to be the best blog header in the business.
I think people like to blame companies for what are actually serious flaws in the models of businesses they run altogether. Even if Amazon was broken up, you'd still see the Chinese fake syndrome because that's more about how peer to peer internet based selling fails to work when gamed, and how cheap foreign manufacturing can be used to clone or game the market. Amazon made it worse mostly by comingling inventory, but there were big problems in the whole "yard sale" Ebay mode of internet business way before that.
Or with ebooks, the problem isn;t "Amazon is too big," it was publishers and authors choosing which standard is the least likely to increase piracy and drive sales, and the customers who actually pay for goods choosing the marketplace that best serves them. If not Amazon, it would have been Sony or Kobo, but it couldn't ever be Smashwords once authors found how often works were pirated from that open platform.
I think people look for scapegoats rather than look at the hard truths about how the internet as a whole isn't particularly working for many types of business models. A lot of the protections that have evolved around physical businesses simply aren't as easy to have or are even available in a net-connected global economy, and the net tends to try and revive a lot of the nasty unregulated models of work from the past as well. Piecework, and penny auctions for example.
There's certainly a risk of AWS becoming a monopoly but too early to tell. Microsoft has a large enterprise user base and increasingly a "good enough" cloud product that combined with Office 365 is very attractive to those enterprises. On the technical side Kubernetes is making it easier to move apps among clouds
I've never used AWS, but I keep seeing news about large companies or organizations, such as the recent Pentagon story [1], exposing all of their customers' data in plain-text.
Is Amazon making it that easy to screw something like that up, or what is going on here? When you see a few random cases likes, you might think it's just an engineering making a dumb mistake, but this is starting to seem systematic, like there's a UX/UI issue at play here that makes all of these companies that should know better screw-up so easily. Or maybe Amazon just needs to make it hard to screw something like this up. So what's going on?
Speaking generally, most services offered by AWS are too low level to be blamed for problems besides outages or similar issues. They are computing and storage resources that behave exactly as they are configured to do.
For example, S3 buckets are not public by default. The Pentagon is entirely to blame for the data breach. Amazon can't make it any harder to make this mistake, because publicly accessible buckets are an extremely common use case, and it is already an explicit choice.
s3 objects are private by default. Someone had to manually change the bucket permissions or upload each object and explicitly state they should be world-readable. This case is more user error than anything.
I believe they are also starting to mail customers whos buckets are marked world-readble just to remind them there could be a security problem if they didn't mean to do this.
Isn't Amazon also AWS' largest customer, followed by Netflix? And I don't know much about Azure but I wouldn't doubt Microsoft is their largest customer too. I don't know, this whole piece seems more like Cringely needing something to write about during his convalescence.
If I want, for any reason, to not use Amazon, I can do that easily (even if I will have to pay more, it is my choice) by typing any other online store or seller into my browser, or going to a local store.
For the typical person, they cannot use anything other than Microsoft if they want to use a computer, period. Except Mac, which many can't afford and which is limiting in what programs it can run.
[+] [-] maltalex|8 years ago|reply
Seems like small potatoes today, doesn't it?
When was the last time you've heard of anti trust litigation because iPhones come with Safari or a whole bunch of Apple services? What about Google and its software on any and all Android phones? And why can Amazon tie Kindle to its book store and not get sued by competitors?
We are allowing these companies to integrate vertically to the point of insanity.
[+] [-] mikestew|8 years ago|reply
When one takes at face value the extremely simplistic way you stated it, yes, it seems small. But that's not what happened. Microsoft was convicted of using their monopoly position in operating systems to extend their reach into web browsers. Practically speaking, the only consumer operating systems at the time ran on personal computers, either desktops or laptops, and in that market Microsoft held an overwhelming market share. There were no mass market smartphones (there was WinCE, but few I knew had them), Palm Pilots held the PDA market for a short while, but all a drop in the bucket compared to full-blown OSs.
When was the last time you've heard of anti trust litigation because iPhones come with Safari or a whole bunch of Apple services?
Go buy a turnkey Android phone if you don't like it.
What about Google and its software on any and all Android phones?
Go buy an iPhone if you don't like that.
And why can Amazon tie Kindle to its book store and not get sued by competitors?
Apple's iBooks has about everything you'll find on Amazon. Haven't used it, but I'd be surprised if Google Books wasn't close enough.
What were you going to buy computer-wise in 2001? A desktop or laptop that came with Microsoft Windows whether you wanted it or not. That was your practical choice, and the courts found that though it was fine for Microsoft to own the OS market, it was not fine to leverage that into driving Netscape out of business.
[+] [-] spiderfarmer|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] matthewmacleod|8 years ago|reply
With the exception of Google in the search market, None of the examples you cite are in monopoly market positions. Nobody will force Apple to allow other browsers on the iPhone, for example, because there are other mobile phones users can purchase if they require that feature.
Google (in the search market) is of course currently being examined by Europe for its possibly-anti-competitive practices. But these things take time.
[+] [-] mjw1007|8 years ago|reply
I didn't follow the court case and I don't know if that was a central part of it, but if it wasn't it should have been.
It's easy to think, now that JavaScript has won, that ActiveX in browsers was never going to take off, but I think there was a real risk (and as I understand it in South Korea it did reach critical mass and effectively force everyone to have access to Internet Explorer for a decade and a half).
I don't think Google have done anything similar to that with Chrome.
[+] [-] ggg9990|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] joering2|8 years ago|reply
And the biggest of all of them -- Google Chrome browser advertised on the Google Search FRONT page with link directly under the search box; a spot seen by billions of people that neither you nor your small business or even a corp with billions in revenue have access to!
It still blows my mind they never got in trouble for that.
[+] [-] wdr1|8 years ago|reply
90%+ of people used a Windows machine exclusively. By making IE the default & forcing OEMs to install it, they were using that that monopoly to crush Netscape.
Today's world is significantly more fragmented. People typically use at least two devices (a mobile device, in addition to a desktop or laptop). No single company controls the browser market the same way MS/IE did. Chrome has 54%[1], whereas IE had peaked at 95%[2].
[1] http://gs.statcounter.com/ [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers#Th...
[+] [-] yuhong|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ringaroundthetx|8 years ago|reply
every time the government actually does something like this, it is merely an instruction manual to every other massive corporation on the planet on how to technically do the same thing but more effectively.
[+] [-] dcwca|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] debaserab2|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jenscow|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|8 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] whatyoucantsay|8 years ago|reply
Their attitude towards labour has been nothing short of Dickensian. I'm not speaking so much of their habit of writing dystopian employment contracts and turning to legal intimidation when employees leave, though that is also a problem, as I am of their treatment of lower paid staff. Refusing dock workers adequate rest, hydration or cooling is indefensible.
However impressive the accomplishments and intellect of Mr. Bezos may be, we can no longer hold any faith he or Amazon will bow to even minimal concerns of human decency. The only levers are the threat of financial and regulatory consequences. The further Amazon's power places them beyond such levers the more dangerous they become.
https://www.salon.com/2014/02/23/worse_than_wal_mart_amazons...
> The series revealed the lengths Amazon was prepared to go to keep costs down and output high and yielded a singular image of Amazon’s ruthlessness—ambulances stationed on hot days at the Amazon center to take employees suffering from heat stroke to the hospital. Despite the summer weather, there was no air-conditioning in the depot, and Amazon refused to let fresh air circulate by opening loading doors at either end of the depot—for fear of theft. Inside the plant there was no slackening of the pace, even as temperatures rose to more than 100 degrees.
> On June 2, 2011, a warehouse employee contacted the US Occupational Safety and Health Administration to report that the heat index had reached 102 degrees in the warehouse and that fifteen workers had collapsed. On June 10 OSHA received a message on its complaints hotline from an emergency room doctor at the Lehigh Valley Hospital: “I’d like to report an unsafe environment with an Amazon facility in Fogelsville. . . . Several patients have come in the last couple of days with heat related injuries.”
It's also worth adding that Amazon eventually did retrofit their facilities with cooling devices but only after their practices drew international media coverage.
[+] [-] Mountain_Skies|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] redwood|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] collyw|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] robotcookies|8 years ago|reply
That link only really gets into the fact that they have a large market share. That alone does't make them a 90s era Microsoft.
[+] [-] Spooky23|8 years ago|reply
- Using third party proxies to avoid accountability for sale of countfeit products, and liability for the same.
- Using its market position and sock puppet partners to replicate and promote knockoff products.
- Using its domination of book market share to bully book publishers into a accepting its terms, and capriciously raising prices and removing pre-order options to those the tow the line. (Hachette)
- Notorious for poor working conditions, for both blue collar and white collar workforces.
I could go on, at length.
Amazon doesn’t force you to use your products, it instead raises the cost of everything you buy by owning the wholesale and distribution channels. Their UPS rates are the price floor. Their predatory tactics allow them to avoid collection of sales and use taxes — pushing them to the consumer. Their wholesale pricing is a price floor in many categories, or shared with WalMart.
Amazon is a monopolist and negative force in the American economy. They exist with their current business practices because the US courts changed their interpretation of what a monopoly is, which is now strictly determined by how corporate actions impact consumer retail prices.
[+] [-] kumarm|8 years ago|reply
You can find amazon apps on Google PlayStore though.
Amazon is definitely the next Microsoft.
[+] [-] zitterbewegung|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kazinator|8 years ago|reply
And is Microsoft buying a national grocery chain? Is Microsoft running a marketplace overrun with fake Chinese shit that takes 3 months to ship?
[+] [-] coldtea|8 years ago|reply
Is any thing in an analogy the same as the thing it points to? No. That's the very idea behind an analogy: that it points to something being alike between two entities, not about them being/doing same exact things (which wouldn't need an analogy) or totally unlike things (for which one wouldn't make sense).
In this case, what Cringely wants you to think/see is not that Amazon "bundles it browser" or "sues Linux a la Sco", but how it's a huge monopoly, it uses its power as leverage, and it screws the little guys.
[+] [-] solatic|8 years ago|reply
Vendor lock-in is a pretty powerful tool. They may not be forcing anyone to "install" their systems into AWS, but once they're installed, they're too difficult to "uninstall." A fundamental requirement of free markets is for customers to be able to leave incumbents for new companies with fresher products that present a better value - if customers de-facto can't leave AWS, then AWS has monopoly power over those customers.
[+] [-] Fnoord|8 years ago|reply
For a list of Amazon controversies, see [1]. It isn't complete. Example: it doesn't contain anything about MTurk [2].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazon.com_controversies
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazon_Mechanical_Turk#Labor_i...
[+] [-] simonbarker87|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mikescandy|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pentae|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dforrestwilson|8 years ago|reply
Jeff Bezos is a true visionary, brilliant, and absolutely should be rewarded for that. We need more folks like him.
On the other hand, at what point has Amazon won enough? Selling things at a loss to drive competitors out of business verticals is surely bad for the consumer in the long-term no?
[+] [-] asveikau|8 years ago|reply
> Jeff Bezos is a true visionary, brilliant,
The guy has a business track record surpassing most, I will give you that -- however, I don't think this kind of idolatry is helpful to anyone, least of all yourself.
[+] [-] nerdponx|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] coldtea|8 years ago|reply
More folks doing the obvious (building an online everything-store) and driving it to a monopoly?
I'd rather we'd have several big online stores.
As for the other ventures Amazon is in, not impressed. I'd rather we'd have more in-company expertise, than a huge IaaS shop (whose price for convenience is central control, loss of privacy, and inflated costs that trickle to the consumers).
[+] [-] maltalex|8 years ago|reply
That's probably true of any billion dollar company founder, not to mention the (more than) trillion dollar Amazon.
> at what point has Amazon won enough? Selling things at a loss to drive competitors out of business verticals is surely bad for the consumer in the long-term no?
What do you mean by "enough"? Amazon is a public for-profit company and such companies are always looking for ways to improve their bottom line. If they see a dollar they can earn, they owe it to their shareholders to do everything they can to earn it.
If Amazon can improve its bottom line by driving competitors out, then that's what it'll do. It's naive to think that the good of the consumer is of any relevance.
[+] [-] dominotw|8 years ago|reply
Not necessarily.
1. They can find efficiencies of scale in the system from operating in such large scale and vertical integration. Then its not bad for the customer.
2.If they have to raise prices when competition is out of business, competition will come back in sooner or later. So maybe its bad for customer in short term.
[+] [-] thisisit|8 years ago|reply
AWS has been light years ahead when it came to cloud computing and now they are having the first mover advantage and the dominant position. But will it last very long? It is very hard to say, over the years companies which were thought infallible have gone down.
[+] [-] ctvo|8 years ago|reply
It might just be too early in the morning for me.
> Part of the reason AWS is gaining market share is because Microsoft’s Azure doesn’t boot virtual machines quite as fast.
Somehow I doubt the gap between virtual machine boot time (and this is mostly applicable only to EC2 vs. Azure Virtual Machines) is worth calling out. It might be due to existing developer buy-in and familiarity with AWS in addition to the continual investment in new services and price matching.
Why would I switch to Azure when AWS exceeds its offering and is priced just as competitively? These are complex platforms with real lock-in. Switching from AWS to anything else requires a substantial investment in learning new tools, technologies and best practices. So far AWS has made it so there's never been a compelling reason for most users.
> ... This too shall pass, but Microsoft will still be smaller. That’s why Redmond has staked out the Enterprise cloud market — alas, the segment most sensitive to such slow boot times.
On-premise cloud and enterprise customers care about virtual machine boot times that much huh? I'd love an example or some citation.
> AWS supports most startups as well as all 17 US intelligence agencies — taking 350,000 PCs out of places like the CIA, Thank Edward Snowden for that one. They are enjoying great success, though AWS partners aren’t enjoying themselves quite as much. Put simply, AWS is a pain to deal with if you are a customer big enough to be in personal communication and not just a credit card number. This, too, is like the old Microsoft.
Anything at all to backup these sentences? I'm not sure they belong together. How does the CIA moving to AWs connect with AWS being a pain to deal with if you're a big customer?
> Tech companies behave this way because most employees are young and haven’t worked anywhere else and because the behavior reflects the character of the founder. If the boss tells you to beat up customers and partners and it’s your first job out of college, then you beat up customers and partners because that’s the only world you know.
These two paragraphs are particularly ... cringely. Jeff Bezos in the vest with the muscular arms is imprinting on these young minds that they can treat customers and partners badly. I think. Somehow.
[+] [-] blfr|8 years ago|reply
Google Cloud seems quite neat and in the same price range. OVH is much cheaper and uses OpenStack. Businesses in the Microsoft sphere should buy Azure quite easily. And there are many smaller, specialized providers for various needs.
Amazon's lead should be eroding not consolidating. Is it just that they were first and everyone standardised on their tools? Devops people choosing AWS on autopilot because it's what they know works?
BTW this has to be the best blog header in the business.
[+] [-] Noos|8 years ago|reply
Or with ebooks, the problem isn;t "Amazon is too big," it was publishers and authors choosing which standard is the least likely to increase piracy and drive sales, and the customers who actually pay for goods choosing the marketplace that best serves them. If not Amazon, it would have been Sony or Kobo, but it couldn't ever be Smashwords once authors found how often works were pirated from that open platform.
I think people look for scapegoats rather than look at the hard truths about how the internet as a whole isn't particularly working for many types of business models. A lot of the protections that have evolved around physical businesses simply aren't as easy to have or are even available in a net-connected global economy, and the net tends to try and revive a lot of the nasty unregulated models of work from the past as well. Piecework, and penny auctions for example.
[+] [-] ridruejo|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mtgx|8 years ago|reply
Is Amazon making it that easy to screw something like that up, or what is going on here? When you see a few random cases likes, you might think it's just an engineering making a dumb mistake, but this is starting to seem systematic, like there's a UX/UI issue at play here that makes all of these companies that should know better screw-up so easily. Or maybe Amazon just needs to make it hard to screw something like this up. So what's going on?
[1] - https://www.pcmag.com/news/357465/pentagon-accidentally-expo...
[+] [-] bfrydl|8 years ago|reply
For example, S3 buckets are not public by default. The Pentagon is entirely to blame for the data breach. Amazon can't make it any harder to make this mistake, because publicly accessible buckets are an extremely common use case, and it is already an explicit choice.
[+] [-] res0nat0r|8 years ago|reply
I believe they are also starting to mail customers whos buckets are marked world-readble just to remind them there could be a security problem if they didn't mean to do this.
[+] [-] empath75|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] markbnj|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tinco|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dfps|8 years ago|reply
If I want, for any reason, to not use Amazon, I can do that easily (even if I will have to pay more, it is my choice) by typing any other online store or seller into my browser, or going to a local store.
For the typical person, they cannot use anything other than Microsoft if they want to use a computer, period. Except Mac, which many can't afford and which is limiting in what programs it can run.
[+] [-] Dowwie|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jaxondu|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|8 years ago|reply
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