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Amazon Reports Surge in Profit

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Re: Amazon Reports Surge in Profit

#101

Post by boulos »

frandroid wrote: post #32
mason55 wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> they build cloud agnostic software that treats providers as a utility It's like browsers all over again. As long as each provider is offering different things or different implementations of the same thing we will either need to choose one or be forced to go through a lowest common denominator translation layer. MSFT, GOOG, and AMZN are all smart enough to not turn this into a race to the bottom of who can provide…

Well so far MSFT and GOOG are regularly slashing prices to keep up with AMZN's price cuts. So we're in the price war stage still, not much at the differentiation stage.

This isn't correct.

Amazon has not matched our May 2015 price cut for GCE (they instead have tossed a couple 5% cuts). They responded to our 2014 cut a day later. We saw a similar reaction with Nearline last year; a few months later they introduced S3 Infrequent Access, but it has plenty of caveats (rounding up to 128 KB per object) and still a 25% higher price per byte.

In the meantime we introduced custom shapes for GCE giving our customers a measured 20% savings. Finally, even Microsoft has per-minute billing.

If you're looking for the best price/performance you'll have to come to Google Cloud.

Disclosure: I work on Google Cloud, so of course I want your business ;)

Re: Amazon Reports Surge in Profit

#102

Post by sokoloff »

GeechieCloud wrote: post #86
sokoloff wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Office 365 relies on Azure as well (unclear how much of it, though)

A number of Microsoft's own services -- including Office 365 business, Office 365 consumer, Bing and Xbox Live -- are not running on its Azure cloud backbone. They are still running on their own custom stacks and datacenters. http://www.zdnet.com/article/microsoft-is-on-a-quest-to-move...

Sentence immediately after the two you quoted:

Certain, newer pieces of some of these services, such as the Azure Active Directory service at the heart of Office 365 and some of the newer, complementary Xbox Live services are hosted on Azure.

Re: Amazon Reports Surge in Profit

#103

Post by discodave »

seizethecheese wrote: post #73
tuna-piano wrote: post #25

Amazon's rationale for its lack of profits is well known... Why does this rationale not apply to its cloud business? Is the cloud business so good that it generates profits regardless of the investment it makes... or is the retail business so bad that it can't generate profits regardless of the investment AMZN makes in it?

This is an interesting question. The e-commerce business seems to provide a near limitless opportunity for fixed investment towards getting your items to you faster. At what point will Amazon no longer have opportunities to invest in better logistics? 1 hour delivery for everything? There are hundreds of billions of dollars worth of investable opportunities there. On the AWS side, I struggle to see a comparison. Yes,…

Current global IT market is trillions of dollars, AWS is ~10B... lots of room there.

Re: Amazon Reports Surge in Profit

#104

Post by seizethecheese »

discodave wrote: post #103
seizethecheese wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is an interesting question. The e-commerce business seems to provide a near limitless opportunity for fixed investment towards getting your items to you faster. At what point will Amazon no longer have opportunities to invest in better logistics? 1 hour delivery for everything? There are hundreds of billions of dollars worth of investable opportunities there. On the AWS side, I struggle to see a comparison. Yes,…

Current global IT market is trillions of dollars, AWS is ~10B... lots of room there.

Of course there's room, but there aren't obvious ways to deploy billions of dollars. Products need to be developed for AWS, whereas for the e-commerce business there is a much stronger link between investment and ROI it seems.

Re: Amazon Reports Surge in Profit

#105

Post by cm2012 »

dredmorbius wrote: post #93
paulddraper wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So....block ad blockers and HN screams. "I will pay for content", they say. "I just don't like your 25MB flash ads." Link to crap, and HN screams. "Is journalism dead? This stuff is just click bait. I appreciate good writing and quality content." Put up a paywall and HN screams. "Why u make me pay?!?!?!?"

The problem is the business model. All of these behaviors 1) are hostile to high-quality accessble content and 2) are fundamentally driven by advertising (or its failure). Information is a public good. This doesn't mean it costs nothing to produce (the contrary), but high-quality public information has a high positive externality to the common wealth (that is, the commonwealth), and is essential in a democratic socie…

Since the government doesn't currently pay for Media, how should journalists currently get paid?

Re: Amazon Reports Surge in Profit

#106

Post by falsedan »

elwell wrote: post #83
mabbo wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Employee stock vesting day. If you get stocks granted as a bonus (most of us do), they vest in may and November. I know guys who've never sold any of their stocks. This will be literally $10k or more in their pockets, if they finally decide to sell.

Does that event generally lower share price on the market?

Non-executive employee stock comp is a tiny fraction of total stock. Yes, the sales will increase supply and push the price down by a pitifully-small amount, and an institutional investor will buy them and push the price back up.

Re: Amazon Reports Surge in Profit

#108

Post by cloudjacker »

dredmorbius wrote: post #93
paulddraper wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So....block ad blockers and HN screams. "I will pay for content", they say. "I just don't like your 25MB flash ads." Link to crap, and HN screams. "Is journalism dead? This stuff is just click bait. I appreciate good writing and quality content." Put up a paywall and HN screams. "Why u make me pay?!?!?!?"

The problem is the business model. All of these behaviors 1) are hostile to high-quality accessble content and 2) are fundamentally driven by advertising (or its failure). Information is a public good. This doesn't mean it costs nothing to produce (the contrary), but high-quality public information has a high positive externality to the common wealth (that is, the commonwealth), and is essential in a democratic socie…

and this is why I like state-run media sources.

99% of the time I'm not looking for things the ministry of foreign policy doesn't want me to know

and it is favorable toward high quality accessible content. everyone concerned about competition and the competition gave you shit that makes state run news a breath of fresh air

Re: Amazon Reports Surge in Profit

#109

Post by falsedan »

mason55 wrote: post #27
Will_Do wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you're right in that Amazon Machine Learning and Azure Machine Learning will never be drop-in replacements for eachother. However, I would argue that VPSs are already drop-in replacements and I bet (though I have no proof) that VPSs are the majority of the market. The cloud providers may not have a viable way to provide even the perception of vendor lock-in when it comes to VPSs. Now it could be that prices a…

Sure, a basic VPS could be a drop-in replacement, but think of all the stuff that goes on with managing that. If you want to automate the creation of new servers then you have to script it or use something like CloudFormation or Troposphere. Either way you are immediately off the "drop-in replacement" path unless you build a middleware layer for your scripts. These guys make their money off the companies that need to…

Terraform works with whatever cloud provider https://www.terraform.io/intro/vs/cloudformation.html

hint hint

Re: Amazon Reports Surge in Profit

#110

Post by hokuriku »

You know what this means, right?

Jeff Bezos will increase investment into AWS and Blue Origin, while not investing anything into improving engineer work-life balance.

Seriously, at least cover MSP and transit! Even partially covering a transit pass would be nice!

Sincerely, an Amazon Vancouver SDE I

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