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When Will AWS Move Up the Stack to Real Applications?

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Re: When Will AWS Move Up the Stack to Real Applications?

#61

Post by paulddraper »

nebabyte wrote: post #38
crabasa wrote: post #5

As a shareholder, hopefully never. Building infrastructure and platforms has three wonderful benefits: * Good customers, where good is defined as smart and willing to spend money. Going up the stack means dealing making sacrifices on both of those dimensions. * Less complex products that stay relevant longer. Amazon builds legos and leaves the task of putting them together to others. The assembly can create value, bu…

Even LEGO sells mass-produced kits. And sure, kids predominantly play with LEGOS by building their own things. But when it comes to toys, LEGO isn't the only thing out there. And which helicopter would you think kids play with - the make-believe one that they have to wave around and pretend flies, or the mass-produced quadcopter that actually flies? Just because Amazon does what it does now well doesn't mean it can't…

The analogy falls apart because Legos blocks are not made of smaller Lego blocks.

AWS does put things together.

E.g. Autoscaling, RDS, Spot Fleets, OpsWorks

Nothing you couldn't do with their more basic pieces.

But these are still reusable and composable.

Re: When Will AWS Move Up the Stack to Real Applications?

#62

Post by jessaustin »

hackerews wrote: post #9

I think - somewhat controversially - that business/productivity apps will make or break AWS. Assuming Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure can reach AWS feature parity and prices, most everyone will likely move their infra to where their apps are. Two (of many) reasons: 1) Biz/productivity apps are better when they connect directly to your infrastructure (eg query and viz features between Google Sheets + BigQuery, etc),…

That integration doesn't seem that hard... the reason we don't see more of it may just be that it's not that valuable? You're never going to move all your BigQuery data to a Google Sheet. You might very well move some transformation of it, but that would be nearly as easy to do across IaaS vendors as within one...

Re: When Will AWS Move Up the Stack to Real Applications?

#63

Post by iainmerrick »

This is a really weirdly-written post! I think it needs some serious editing before it's worth reading. This sentence jumped out at me:

"This is natural enough for all IT suppliers, which triple their revenues when they start going up the hockey stick curve, than then they double revenues for a while, then it cools down to maybe 80 percent growth and then 50 percent growth and then 25 percent growth and then the rate of change gradually slows until it matches the overall rate of spending in the IT sector overall."

All the stuff between "triple their revenue" and "gradually slows" is redundant waffle.

Re: When Will AWS Move Up the Stack to Real Applications?

#64

Post by ximeng »

iamacynic wrote: post #58
Spooky23 wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If they're spending $1M/week, what do they expect to spend on their own? If you're too dumb to manage costs on AWS, the answer is "we have no clue".

a competitor that charges literally 75% less. except they won't do it, because they are SCARED out of their MINDS.

Scared by what?

Re: When Will AWS Move Up the Stack to Real Applications?

#65

Post by iainmerrick »

nebabyte wrote: post #38
crabasa wrote: post #5

As a shareholder, hopefully never. Building infrastructure and platforms has three wonderful benefits: * Good customers, where good is defined as smart and willing to spend money. Going up the stack means dealing making sacrifices on both of those dimensions. * Less complex products that stay relevant longer. Amazon builds legos and leaves the task of putting them together to others. The assembly can create value, bu…

Even LEGO sells mass-produced kits. And sure, kids predominantly play with LEGOS by building their own things. But when it comes to toys, LEGO isn't the only thing out there. And which helicopter would you think kids play with - the make-believe one that they have to wave around and pretend flies, or the mass-produced quadcopter that actually flies? Just because Amazon does what it does now well doesn't mean it can't…

And which helicopter would you think kids play with - the make-believe one that they have to wave around and pretend flies, or the mass-produced quadcopter that actually flies?

Mostly the Lego one. :)

Re: When Will AWS Move Up the Stack to Real Applications?

#66

Post by adventured »

nebabyte wrote: post #24

The amount of denial in this thread is hilarious. Any level at which profit is made, you can assume Amazon will reach. They already have several large offerings at the application level, and there's no reason for them not to build or acquire further applications. You didn't think that "growth potential" of theirs' was going to stay in the corner selling books, did you?

I agree. They've already done it over and over and over again with AWS. The article is casting a premise that has never been the case: AWS has always been in the real application business. Practically every expansion of AWS has involved adding real applications. Even Prime storage is a 'real application,' that sits on top of AWS, that competes in part with Dropbox and others.

All tech platforms devour the surrounding territory if they can. The last 40 years of tech history is littered with the corpses of formerly successful niche products/companies/services that were wiped out by expansive platforms.

Just go down the list of AWS services:

CDN = real application

Database products = several real applications (just ask Oracle, who is spooked by AWS)

DNS service = real application

Analytics = several real applications

Chime, Workdocs, WorkMail = real applications

Messaging = several real applications

And on it goes.

So what, they won't get into CRM? Of course they will. Amazon will use AWS to push into high margin enterprise software, specifically designed to target Oracle, Salesforce, et al. Because why not, the margins are there to be attacked. Anything that AWS gets near is a target in the next decade.

Re: When Will AWS Move Up the Stack to Real Applications?

#67

Post by lstroud »

crabasa wrote: post #5

As a shareholder, hopefully never. Building infrastructure and platforms has three wonderful benefits: * Good customers, where good is defined as smart and willing to spend money. Going up the stack means dealing making sacrifices on both of those dimensions. * Less complex products that stay relevant longer. Amazon builds legos and leaves the task of putting them together to others. The assembly can create value, bu…

Do we not consider the storefront and payment processing offerings business software? What about Aurora, Redshit, and EMR competing directly with Oracle and SQL Server? Or, their replacement of a number of web application servers? Seems like they started to climb that vine a while back.

Re: When Will AWS Move Up the Stack to Real Applications?

#68

Post by adventured »

qeternity wrote: post #8

Why would they want to? Levi Strauss didn't get rich prospecting. Let Amazon sell the jeans and pick axes (both digitally and physically in their case) to the modern day prospectors.

Because plenty of enterprise companies did get rich prospecting. And as to your analogy: there's a lot more money in being BHP, Exxon, Chevron, Shell, BP, Glencore, Rio Tinto, etc. than in selling the shovels.

Oracle has earned $30 billion in net income the last three years and is worth $183 billion. That's just one enterprise company. It's as simple as that. There's no scenario under which AWS doesn't increasingly target enterprise software companies, in an attempt to commoditize various products & services they provide and destroy their margins.

Re: When Will AWS Move Up the Stack to Real Applications?

#70

Post by inferiorhuman »

iamacynic wrote: post #49
user5994461 wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> they are fickle and extremely price sensitive Not at all. Most customers couldn't care less about money. There are numerous people who are price sensitive, the amateurs who are running a test app and complaining that digital ocean is cheaper, then move to the weirdest hoster they could find because that's only $2 a month. These are NOT AWS customers.

> Not at all. Most customers couldn't care less about money. you're out of your mind. customers at the high end care MORE about money, not less. the company spending $1 million/month on AWS is desperately looking for ways out. DESPERATELY. their entire business is being held hostage by amazon. jeff bezos has them by the balls and is squeezing harder and harder by the day. they have hired consultants to do the analysi…

> customers at the high end care MORE about money, not less. the company spending $1 million/month on AWS is desperately looking for ways out.

Our monthly AWS spend was six or seven figures. We were ostensibly looking for ways to both move to and from AWS, but we were hardly desperate. It turns out running data centers is HARD and it simply wasn't our core competency. If you're not profitable with AWS you're probably not going to be profitable moving to your own data center (or racks within a data center).

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