The company made SO much money in the past 4 decades with big box / discount retailing, you won't believe it. Salaries are off the charts (it would make senior software engineers in SV look pale). Hubris is as well. The only thing that drives reasoning are statements like 'we're not just some random company, we're Schwarz Group'. It's the poster child Corp described by Andy Gorves statement: Success breeds complacency, complacency breeds failure. Only the paranoid survive.
At the same time, skill level did not take off so much. Just to give you some insight: The Lidl online store team is not even aware of KPIs like CAC or LTV or even how many new customers were acquired in a given year. And it's a 10-year-old unit (still burning millions per year) .
The whole corporation is basically a 2-person-empire (the only two people that own shares and have taken the thing from 1 store to ~13k stores globally). They make every major call, and even random minor calls. It should be mentioned that they are 72 and 80 years old, respectively.
The Cloud idea very likely was acquired together with a former SAP cloud sales VP. Here is the difference: Core Schwarz DNA is selling packed soup to end customers at crazy scale, without even intervening in the whole process. Core DNA SAP is large scale enterprise sales. Go read the Stratechery posting about why Google failed with GCP to understand why Schwarz should not do this. When I once mentioned this in a LinkedIn thread, I was urged by colleagues to delete the comment because 'management did not like it'.
They are getting into the car sales and recycle business as well. Just to give you an impression.
Just to add another data point, Lidl is also the retailer that pays the best market salaries in the Eastern-European country where I live in (they actually included that in several of their hiring ads), and I'm talking about shop people like cashiers and the people that put things on the shelves.
> They are getting into the car sales and recycle business as well.
In here they've also opened a tourism agency that does quite well (or used to do before the virus hit).
I agree though about the big difference between the German and US management. I have a close friend that works at the regional Lidl HQ and she got reprimanded just after being hired for having used the singular "you" (less formal) instead of the plural "you" (I'm not sure how it translates into German) when addressing herself to her bosses on the company's hallways (said friend used to work for a big US company before moving to Lidl). She was lucky though because not a week after her arrival there was a company-wide email coming from the powers that be instructing the employees to use the less formal singular "you" instead of the more formal plural "you", to which all the employees in the company acquiesced.
>> The Cloud idea very likely was acquired together with a former SAP cloud sales VP. Here is the difference: Core Schwarz DNA is selling packed soup to end customers at a crazy scale, without even intervening in the whole process. Core DNA SAP is a large scale enterprise sales. Go read the Stratechery posting about why Google failed with GCP to understand why Schwarz should not do this.
This is exactly what I have guessed. Many people think that replicating AWS is just the question of money. It is not. Most of the great datacenter people are hired by AWS, MS and Google. These are the guys who can think of cost efficient reliable solutions, quite often inventing new things in the process that the outside world has no idea. I was watching countless videos while working for Amazon about the data center tech. Mind blown, every single time. I seriously doubt that the Schwarz group will be able to attract the talent to replicate this. Many of the AWS guys are life timers, do not care about money. What is a more likely scenario that they will burn through a few billion EUR before realizing that they know nothing about cloud computing and cut their losses.
I was running a stall at a graduate careers fair and was amazed at the interest both Aldi and Lidl were getting.
Both had amazing starting salaries - I think Aldi was £48k rising to £70k over 3 years if you went on the area manager scheme. Plus a car. The teams there were so enthusiastic and energised and appeared to really really enjoy their jobs.
I am impressed by any company that consistently looks after their staff financially and otherwise.
They don't have any IT skills, but much money and are constantly crying for "digital transformation" what usually only leads them to being conned by big consulting agencies.
I worked in the Real Estate Dept at Lidl for a (very) short time, awful company. Never have I seen people being treated so badly, especially in stores.
Their IT was an absolute joke back then, we had to use a 20-year-old ERP and most of the work was done on paper. Thinking that these guys could take on AWS sounds ludicrous to me. However, they are cost-killers and hyper-aggressive when it comes to selling, so this might even work...
I received few offers from them and their salaries where in par with what I earn in Italy (around 100k) which is very good for Europe but not as much as SV
> The whole corporation is basically a 2-person-empire (the only two people that own shares and have taken the thing from 1 store to ~13k stores globally). They make every major call, and even random minor calls. It should be mentioned that they are 72 and 80 years old, respectively.
Sounds very similar to Dyson. The biggest problem is that nobody wants to make decisions because what's the point when James Dyson is just going to come along and casually overruled it? Especially frustrating if it's something he isn't interested in.
This quality of this article is terrible. It's very short (235 words), there are no concrete sources, or solid evidence that this is real. This is nothing more than speculation. Is this considered journalism is 2020?
Even more sad, is when you search and try to find better sources, and realize that it's mostly just a few small, outlier publications, copy and pasting off of each other. Business Insider unabashedly copy and pasted from Charged Retail, and didn't even bother to format/ edit/ paraphrase anything. Even text from the link to sign up for the Charged Retail news letter is in there (https://markets.businessinsider.com/news/stocks/lidl-owner-l...).
So the way I see this, there is no story here. This is not real news. This is a rumor. Maybe even fake news. Nothing more, so let's stop talking about it.
- Logistics in Germany is awesome, and Amazon really doesn't have a leg up on the already existing logistics solutions there.
- For a cloud provider, negotiating deals now when AMD is on the rise must be perfect.
- Beating AWS on EC2 pricing is easy. AWS EC2 pricing is insanely expensive. German providers like Hetzner Cloud entered the market at 1/10th of the EC2 price.
- A k8s-focused cloud provider gets an enormous number of already existing k8s services without the need to compete directly with all the AWS services.
A "Hetzner Cloud" + K8S in Germany? I'd move all my stuff there.
We host a lot of our infrastructure on Hetzner Cloud and are very happy, but to be fair it's a long long shot away from what AWS offers. You basically only have compute, storage and networking, only three datacenters and two regions to choose from and no managed services at all. You also can't do advanced networking like announcing your own IP addresses (Hetzner only allows that in colocation). You also only have a few instance types available, with RAM maxing out at 32 GB and no GPU servers available.
Don't get me wrong I love Hetzner and their cloud offering and I think they're doing a fantastic job, but it is not comparable to platforms like AWS, Azure or GCP. It's good enough for simple use cases but I think most large companies that want to switch from on-premise would have a hard time adopting it since so many crucial features are missing.
The LIDL cloud will have the same problem I think: They will probably build it on top of OpenStack or Kubernetes but will never reach feature parity with AWS, Azure or GCP. I think in their niche (retailing, logistics) they might be able to get some good adoption if they offer specific services and infrastructure based on their own use cases and experience, but this isn't really competition for AWS, at least not in the broader sense.
> Beating AWS on EC2 pricing is easy. AWS EC2 pricing is insanely expensive. German providers like Hetzner Cloud entered the market at 1/10th of the EC2 price.
This has always been my problem with AWS. Cost savings might make sense for someone who actually needs 200 servers but if I just want one I'm paying 10 times as much for half as much in terms of performance.
It rubs me the wrong way when a $70/mo AWS instance is more than twice as slow than a $10/mo 'traditional' VPS instance.
> A k8s-focused cloud provider gets an enormous number of already existing k8s services without the need to compete directly with all the AWS services.
Not really. AWS is largely independent service products with a few shared core services. K8s is just the core services.
Each AWS service is effectively its own product. Regardless of what tech you have in the background, you would have to make a complete product to compete with AWS's version. You would still have to build an entire customer interface and documentation and do product support.
Or you could build one giant monolith product that isn't decomposeable into services, and at that point you're no longer an AWS competitor, you're just another weird PaaS that enterprise won't touch. Enterprise is a whale, and you need whales.
Looking at k8s like it's a business solution is like looking at a wheel+tire and thinking it's a car.
Also, for online retailers to put their eggs in Amazon's basket means they put their destiny in the hands of a competitor. Going for example with Azure is safer from this perspective.
That said, Lidl is closer to Amazon than Microsoft, from that point of view.
Hetzner Cloud exists and some efforts to automate Kubernetes deployments exist as well. It is of course not as polished as similar k8s AWS solutions, but as you said yourself it is much cheaper.
I've been to LIDL / Schwarz Group headquarters in Heilbronn last year, and while they're a super young company with a vibrant atmosphere (which quite unique amongst large German companies), IMO they are ultimately too much attached to their legacy cash cows.
They are not streamlining retail processes because they earn too much money with it.
They have great IT talent, which is building fancy pilots all day, but refuse roll them out because it will cannibalize their core business. Their core business is keeping people in the store for as long as possible so they buy more stuff.
On the logistics side, they have been the first large-scale retailer to digitize the EUR-pallets (they have RFID-based plastic pallets) which allows for some pretty fancy stuff.
They roll out their pallet processing tech at the suppliers' plant and have logistics data in their systems even before it is loaded on the suppliers' trucks.
I'm currently getting a 500 on the link. Here's [1] an alternative source, originally in German but put through Google Translate.
There's three things to note there: it's not Lidl itself, but the parent company doing this, and the plans were announced late last year. Also they're building out the infrastructure for internal use first and are not necessarily looking to offer a cloud to customers, though they may work with select other companies.
EDIT: I was able to load the original source just now and it claims that following an acquisition they were now offering/planning to offer this service to other retailers. I cannot find other sources (particular German ones) supporting this claim. The blog of the allegedly acquired company speaks of a "strategic partnership" and "investment" only [2].
EDIT 2: This [3] is the German source that the link on this post refers to. Unfortunately it's paywalled. The abstract claims that the acquisition is a "building block in building out their Cloud business".
I doubt the headline properly captures their intent, the article itself is very light on details, but this quote might shine some light at it:
"Lidl’s parent company Schwarz Group is taking on Amazon by launching its own cloud computing service for third party retailers."
My guess would be that they are not aiming to compete with AWS per se, rather to offer infrastructure and services for online stores, which could possibly include having their own data centers for the service part.
While the concerns over Schwarz Group's (because it is the parent group, not 'Lidl') lack of experience in the sector is valid, I do think some of the dismissive reactions here underline a major risk to future competitiveness in infrastructure providers.
Amazon is well established. Amazon has thousands of employees. Amazon does, ultimately, provide a good service. But Amazon is also dominant, demonstrates a callous disregard for worker rights in its other business arms, and has used its solid AWS profits as a way to prop up its undercutting and dismantling of other sectors.
Other businesses will not enter the space in as developed a state as AWS. That shouldn't be used as a negative against them even trying. Otherwise, AWS is only going to become more entrenched and the options for building at scale will become more limited.
I'm really confused why they think european data protection laws are likely to be a big barrier. I think Amazon is well poised to let you choose regions for things, and unless LIDL knows something we don't, will probably be able to adapt to almost any new regulations as well or as fast as Lidl could.
I also wonder why I would trust LIDL to execute on a vital part of infrastructure for us, when they can't manage an SAP migration project...
American companies so far have been really bad at actually complying with regulations like the GDPR - many do on the surface level, but if you're a European company that wants to do things right and not take risks on the interpretation of things like "consent", suddenly your pool of potential third-party data processors drops significantly. There's a serious cultural issue there.
When you look at the details, it looks much more as though they're launching an alternative to Ocado, a company providing technology for food retailers to offer home delivery - they work with Kroger in the US.
Europe, especially Germany, has this general consensus that EU needs it's inhouse large cloud providers. So think about state subsidies, preferring european partners and stuff like that.
With enough capital and will they will get to somewhere. You can be sure the political establishment likely has their back.
I guess this is the result of their epic failed migration to SAP. They blowed 500 Million and 7+ years in an attempt to unify their IT on SAP, until they realized it's just not working. I guess they then started building their own solution, and bring now others into the round, which is kinda similar to how AWS started. Amazon too started offering their extra resources to others, until it grow into a business of their own.
I have my doubt, but I really hope this becomes something good. Good european competition in that sector is quite neccessary. We have seen how european laws influenced the world, and especially USA in the last years, hopefully business can reach similar effects.
Sometimes I play a game with myself where I read the HN comments first, then read the piece. It's like watching a game of telephone.
To my reading
a) lidl is NOT launching an AWS competitor, per se
b) this is all about the data and the power of the logistics platform
Amazon is heavy in the food business.
Amazon observes the use of any of its primitive services by any competitors to determine where growth is occurring, then goes and eats competitor business.
Lidl will not use AWS, wants its supply chain to not use AWS, and would prefer to have adjacent businesses use primitives (like distribution logistics) it makes available so it can observe and eat them when time is right.
For some time now I think why Hetzner is that weak? We've used them in my last Startup and their cloud offering was fine (price, quality), but to use them one would need loadbalancers and managed Postgres and some caching
We managed that on our own but it felt unnecessary. AWS has a lot of bells and whistles not every one needs, but there is a set of tools you need to operate a website. I currently use DO who are very slow but get there I think.
Not everyone needs to compete in the same market. There are some EU providers moving in that direction (e.g. OVH now offers managed Kubernetes, block storage, load balancers, etc), but Hetzner is very useful if you don't need that stuff.
This seems sufficiently unlikely that I wonder if something has been lost in translation.
My guess would be that Lidl does expect to do something innovative in e-commerce (around, say, augmented reality) and is planning to offer that as a service to other retailers, hence the comparison with Amazon's strategy. I can't believe that Lidl is planning to compete with S3 or EC2.
Someone else mentioned 'hubris' here. We had a Lidl open up near us 2 years ago (in the US) - generally good store with good prices. Nice size. We were looking forward to more. We saw where they'd opened some of their stores, and couldn't figure out the justification - some locations just seemed odd. Read a few months later that they were 'scaling back' US development, and new build stores would be about half the size of the one we got (which... isn't huge). They couldn't hire regional people to help them find better locations?
Their inventory system seems out of whack - the stuff we buy regularly will just ... vanish, never to come back. We've been shopping and heard others complain of the same thing - sometimes the same items we were looking for (and had used to buy).
Their in store bakery was initially great - for about a week, then scaled back and rarely has anything fresh - regardless of time of day. You can tell if/when there's been some regional VP to visit that day because the bakery is hot/fresh/piping that day, then... offline. Now... many US folks in grocery stores may not be used to 'good bakeries', and perhaps it was a money loser for them, but... they didn't really give ours a chance to develop with the local shoppers in the first place. Give people more than 2 choices of bread - do it for a month or two, to give people time to try out options, get a rhythm, etc. Buying something, liking it, then coming back 3 days later for more and the bakery is effectively 'closed'... doesn't make you want to come back.
I wish they'd focus more on better in store inventory/stocking before moving to be an AWS-killer....
[+] [-] benjohnson1707|5 years ago|reply
The company made SO much money in the past 4 decades with big box / discount retailing, you won't believe it. Salaries are off the charts (it would make senior software engineers in SV look pale). Hubris is as well. The only thing that drives reasoning are statements like 'we're not just some random company, we're Schwarz Group'. It's the poster child Corp described by Andy Gorves statement: Success breeds complacency, complacency breeds failure. Only the paranoid survive.
At the same time, skill level did not take off so much. Just to give you some insight: The Lidl online store team is not even aware of KPIs like CAC or LTV or even how many new customers were acquired in a given year. And it's a 10-year-old unit (still burning millions per year) .
The whole corporation is basically a 2-person-empire (the only two people that own shares and have taken the thing from 1 store to ~13k stores globally). They make every major call, and even random minor calls. It should be mentioned that they are 72 and 80 years old, respectively.
The Cloud idea very likely was acquired together with a former SAP cloud sales VP. Here is the difference: Core Schwarz DNA is selling packed soup to end customers at crazy scale, without even intervening in the whole process. Core DNA SAP is large scale enterprise sales. Go read the Stratechery posting about why Google failed with GCP to understand why Schwarz should not do this. When I once mentioned this in a LinkedIn thread, I was urged by colleagues to delete the comment because 'management did not like it'.
They are getting into the car sales and recycle business as well. Just to give you an impression.
Interesting times though :)
[+] [-] paganel|5 years ago|reply
Just to add another data point, Lidl is also the retailer that pays the best market salaries in the Eastern-European country where I live in (they actually included that in several of their hiring ads), and I'm talking about shop people like cashiers and the people that put things on the shelves.
> They are getting into the car sales and recycle business as well.
In here they've also opened a tourism agency that does quite well (or used to do before the virus hit).
I agree though about the big difference between the German and US management. I have a close friend that works at the regional Lidl HQ and she got reprimanded just after being hired for having used the singular "you" (less formal) instead of the plural "you" (I'm not sure how it translates into German) when addressing herself to her bosses on the company's hallways (said friend used to work for a big US company before moving to Lidl). She was lucky though because not a week after her arrival there was a company-wide email coming from the powers that be instructing the employees to use the less formal singular "you" instead of the more formal plural "you", to which all the employees in the company acquiesced.
[+] [-] StreamBright|5 years ago|reply
This is exactly what I have guessed. Many people think that replicating AWS is just the question of money. It is not. Most of the great datacenter people are hired by AWS, MS and Google. These are the guys who can think of cost efficient reliable solutions, quite often inventing new things in the process that the outside world has no idea. I was watching countless videos while working for Amazon about the data center tech. Mind blown, every single time. I seriously doubt that the Schwarz group will be able to attract the talent to replicate this. Many of the AWS guys are life timers, do not care about money. What is a more likely scenario that they will burn through a few billion EUR before realizing that they know nothing about cloud computing and cut their losses.
It is going to be interesting to watch though.
[+] [-] ljf|5 years ago|reply
Both had amazing starting salaries - I think Aldi was £48k rising to £70k over 3 years if you went on the area manager scheme. Plus a car. The teams there were so enthusiastic and energised and appeared to really really enjoy their jobs.
I am impressed by any company that consistently looks after their staff financially and otherwise.
[+] [-] TulliusCicero|5 years ago|reply
I have a hard time believing this, given that senior engineers at places like Google or Facebook are making 300k+.
[+] [-] k__|5 years ago|reply
Big problem in German enterprise.
They don't have any IT skills, but much money and are constantly crying for "digital transformation" what usually only leads them to being conned by big consulting agencies.
[+] [-] moonlgn|5 years ago|reply
Their IT was an absolute joke back then, we had to use a 20-year-old ERP and most of the work was done on paper. Thinking that these guys could take on AWS sounds ludicrous to me. However, they are cost-killers and hyper-aggressive when it comes to selling, so this might even work...
[+] [-] chx|5 years ago|reply
I believe you meant https://stratechery.com/2019/the-value-chain-constraint/
[+] [-] asjw|5 years ago|reply
Are they?
I received few offers from them and their salaries where in par with what I earn in Italy (around 100k) which is very good for Europe but not as much as SV
[+] [-] IshKebab|5 years ago|reply
Sounds very similar to Dyson. The biggest problem is that nobody wants to make decisions because what's the point when James Dyson is just going to come along and casually overruled it? Especially frustrating if it's something he isn't interested in.
[+] [-] odiroot|5 years ago|reply
They were also supposed to get into housing.
[+] [-] _pmf_|5 years ago|reply
To be fair, the recycle business is basically "free money" in Germany.
[+] [-] unknown|5 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] eru|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 40four|5 years ago|reply
Even more sad, is when you search and try to find better sources, and realize that it's mostly just a few small, outlier publications, copy and pasting off of each other. Business Insider unabashedly copy and pasted from Charged Retail, and didn't even bother to format/ edit/ paraphrase anything. Even text from the link to sign up for the Charged Retail news letter is in there (https://markets.businessinsider.com/news/stocks/lidl-owner-l...).
So the way I see this, there is no story here. This is not real news. This is a rumor. Maybe even fake news. Nothing more, so let's stop talking about it.
[+] [-] SparklingCotton|5 years ago|reply
- Logistics in Germany is awesome, and Amazon really doesn't have a leg up on the already existing logistics solutions there.
- For a cloud provider, negotiating deals now when AMD is on the rise must be perfect.
- Beating AWS on EC2 pricing is easy. AWS EC2 pricing is insanely expensive. German providers like Hetzner Cloud entered the market at 1/10th of the EC2 price.
- A k8s-focused cloud provider gets an enormous number of already existing k8s services without the need to compete directly with all the AWS services.
A "Hetzner Cloud" + K8S in Germany? I'd move all my stuff there.
[+] [-] ThePhysicist|5 years ago|reply
Don't get me wrong I love Hetzner and their cloud offering and I think they're doing a fantastic job, but it is not comparable to platforms like AWS, Azure or GCP. It's good enough for simple use cases but I think most large companies that want to switch from on-premise would have a hard time adopting it since so many crucial features are missing.
The LIDL cloud will have the same problem I think: They will probably build it on top of OpenStack or Kubernetes but will never reach feature parity with AWS, Azure or GCP. I think in their niche (retailing, logistics) they might be able to get some good adoption if they offer specific services and infrastructure based on their own use cases and experience, but this isn't really competition for AWS, at least not in the broader sense.
[+] [-] eb0la|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] BiteCode_dev|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kleiba|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ryan-allen|5 years ago|reply
This has always been my problem with AWS. Cost savings might make sense for someone who actually needs 200 servers but if I just want one I'm paying 10 times as much for half as much in terms of performance.
It rubs me the wrong way when a $70/mo AWS instance is more than twice as slow than a $10/mo 'traditional' VPS instance.
[+] [-] carlmr|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] peterwwillis|5 years ago|reply
Not really. AWS is largely independent service products with a few shared core services. K8s is just the core services.
Each AWS service is effectively its own product. Regardless of what tech you have in the background, you would have to make a complete product to compete with AWS's version. You would still have to build an entire customer interface and documentation and do product support.
Or you could build one giant monolith product that isn't decomposeable into services, and at that point you're no longer an AWS competitor, you're just another weird PaaS that enterprise won't touch. Enterprise is a whale, and you need whales.
Looking at k8s like it's a business solution is like looking at a wheel+tire and thinking it's a car.
[+] [-] mongol|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] radiator|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bflesch|5 years ago|reply
They are not streamlining retail processes because they earn too much money with it. They have great IT talent, which is building fancy pilots all day, but refuse roll them out because it will cannibalize their core business. Their core business is keeping people in the store for as long as possible so they buy more stuff.
On the logistics side, they have been the first large-scale retailer to digitize the EUR-pallets (they have RFID-based plastic pallets) which allows for some pretty fancy stuff.
They roll out their pallet processing tech at the suppliers' plant and have logistics data in their systems even before it is loaded on the suppliers' trucks.
[+] [-] Cu3PO42|5 years ago|reply
There's three things to note there: it's not Lidl itself, but the parent company doing this, and the plans were announced late last year. Also they're building out the infrastructure for internal use first and are not necessarily looking to offer a cloud to customers, though they may work with select other companies.
EDIT: I was able to load the original source just now and it claims that following an acquisition they were now offering/planning to offer this service to other retailers. I cannot find other sources (particular German ones) supporting this claim. The blog of the allegedly acquired company speaks of a "strategic partnership" and "investment" only [2].
EDIT 2: This [3] is the German source that the link on this post refers to. Unfortunately it's paywalled. The abstract claims that the acquisition is a "building block in building out their Cloud business".
[1] https://translate.googleusercontent.com/translate_c?depth=1&...
[2] https://camao.one/blog/partnerschaft-schwarz-gruppe-heilbron...
[3] https://www.lebensmittelzeitung.net/tech-logistik/Lidl-und-K...
[+] [-] ksec|5 years ago|reply
It then also mention Delivery in UK, and ecommerce projects. Which makes me doubt if the publication knows what AWS really is.
The whole piece ( If you can even call it a piece ) is very poor reporting, to the point I am thinking of should I be flagging this.
Edit: Please Read Comment by Cu3PO42 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23151233.
[+] [-] jonex|5 years ago|reply
"Lidl’s parent company Schwarz Group is taking on Amazon by launching its own cloud computing service for third party retailers."
My guess would be that they are not aiming to compete with AWS per se, rather to offer infrastructure and services for online stores, which could possibly include having their own data centers for the service part.
[+] [-] drawfloat|5 years ago|reply
Amazon is well established. Amazon has thousands of employees. Amazon does, ultimately, provide a good service. But Amazon is also dominant, demonstrates a callous disregard for worker rights in its other business arms, and has used its solid AWS profits as a way to prop up its undercutting and dismantling of other sectors.
Other businesses will not enter the space in as developed a state as AWS. That shouldn't be used as a negative against them even trying. Otherwise, AWS is only going to become more entrenched and the options for building at scale will become more limited.
[+] [-] estsauver|5 years ago|reply
I also wonder why I would trust LIDL to execute on a vital part of infrastructure for us, when they can't manage an SAP migration project...
https://www.consultancy.uk/news/18243/lidl-cancels-sap-intro...
[+] [-] oblio|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] vertex-four|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] markvdb|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Eduard|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gridlockd|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bashtoni|5 years ago|reply
When you look at the details, it looks much more as though they're launching an alternative to Ocado, a company providing technology for food retailers to offer home delivery - they work with Kroger in the US.
[+] [-] fsloth|5 years ago|reply
With enough capital and will they will get to somewhere. You can be sure the political establishment likely has their back.
[+] [-] bigtones|5 years ago|reply
For comparison, Amazon has 40,000 employees in AWS.
[+] [-] slightwinder|5 years ago|reply
I have my doubt, but I really hope this becomes something good. Good european competition in that sector is quite neccessary. We have seen how european laws influenced the world, and especially USA in the last years, hopefully business can reach similar effects.
[+] [-] isthisnametaken|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] breakingcups|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jonahbenton|5 years ago|reply
To my reading
a) lidl is NOT launching an AWS competitor, per se
b) this is all about the data and the power of the logistics platform
Amazon is heavy in the food business.
Amazon observes the use of any of its primitive services by any competitors to determine where growth is occurring, then goes and eats competitor business.
Lidl will not use AWS, wants its supply chain to not use AWS, and would prefer to have adjacent businesses use primitives (like distribution logistics) it makes available so it can observe and eat them when time is right.
Walmart already two years ahead in this game.
[+] [-] KingOfCoders|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] icebraining|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rjknight|5 years ago|reply
My guess would be that Lidl does expect to do something innovative in e-commerce (around, say, augmented reality) and is planning to offer that as a service to other retailers, hence the comparison with Amazon's strategy. I can't believe that Lidl is planning to compete with S3 or EC2.
[+] [-] Hir0ki|5 years ago|reply
By the looks of it they want to start with a managed K8s and database services.
If you look at the job offers, you can see that they are using OpenStack[1] for some parts of there platfrom
[0] https://stackit.de/en/cloud/ [1] https://schwarz.jobs.schwarz/job/Neckarsulm-&-Umgebung-Cloud...
[+] [-] lowercased|5 years ago|reply
Their inventory system seems out of whack - the stuff we buy regularly will just ... vanish, never to come back. We've been shopping and heard others complain of the same thing - sometimes the same items we were looking for (and had used to buy).
Their in store bakery was initially great - for about a week, then scaled back and rarely has anything fresh - regardless of time of day. You can tell if/when there's been some regional VP to visit that day because the bakery is hot/fresh/piping that day, then... offline. Now... many US folks in grocery stores may not be used to 'good bakeries', and perhaps it was a money loser for them, but... they didn't really give ours a chance to develop with the local shoppers in the first place. Give people more than 2 choices of bread - do it for a month or two, to give people time to try out options, get a rhythm, etc. Buying something, liking it, then coming back 3 days later for more and the bakery is effectively 'closed'... doesn't make you want to come back.
I wish they'd focus more on better in store inventory/stocking before moving to be an AWS-killer....
[+] [-] asynch8|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] C1sc0cat|5 years ago|reply