301–310 of 410 posts
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I agree. Amazon would do the same. I am responding to all the articles that are sympathetic to Wal-Mart.
Emotions aside, it's hard to deny facts: "Walmart employs an astounding 2.1 million people. In the United States alone, the company employs 1.4 million people. This is a staggering 1% of the U.S.'s 140 million working population."
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"Free" in the sense that they have the 1st Amendment right to do so. Not in the sense that they actually can, especially once Walmart gets to be a significant customer to them.
How is that any different than any business that has one large customer? And if you're creating a valuable product at a good price, then you have leverage over Walmart. If you're selling a commodity, then be prepared to get squeezed. That's how it should work.
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I think Amazon just stopped its collaboration with Coinstar, as it wasn't an option at the grocery store (HEB) machine I used last month.
I guess I haven't changed any coins in the last month, but I just looked at the Coinstar website listing for the kiosk I usually use, and "Amazon.com" is still listed as an "eGift" brand.
http://www.coinstar.com/KioskFinder?element=Partner&parmName...
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It's not paranoia. An ex-Amazon manager told me fairly recently that they look at customer performance data (trends etc) when evaluating future business opportunities. So once you start getting traction and customers, there's some internal product manager evaluating whether it's worth entering your market.
I highly doubt this. It would be extremely careless by Amazon to jeopardize their insanely-successful, industry-leading profit-machine with something so reckless.
I don't think anyone will have a confirmed example of it happening to AWS customers - but if they are completely willing to destroy smaller vendors on the retail side with their own branded products, I can't imagine them saying AWS is where they draw the ethics line in the sand.
You could make a case for Netflix being an example on the AWS side, but I'd bet more on coincidence.
Amazon would be amazingly and utterly stupid if they were not analyzing their AWS service usage/traffic/spends by market vertical, and I'd imagine must more granular than that. That's simply to sell to people. It's not much of a leap to start using that data to direct internal development and identify unexpected areas of growth.
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It's not paranoia. An ex-Amazon manager told me fairly recently that they look at customer performance data (trends etc) when evaluating future business opportunities. So once you start getting traction and customers, there's some internal product manager evaluating whether it's worth entering your market.
I highly doubt this. It would be extremely careless by Amazon to jeopardize their insanely-successful, industry-leading profit-machine with something so reckless.
It's a good thing those never happened either.
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By the same token, if I were in Amazon's position, if I were to use the data, I'd make sure nobody knew about it. However, I'd then be in the unenviable position of the Enigma codebreakers, attempting to use information without the enemy knowing I had it.
And also puts them in the impossible position of having enough top-notch Xen developers that can code a Xen data interception module that runs in the hypervisor to snoop traffic in real-time from instances, while at the same time, expecting this team to keep quiet about it while also making sure that no other team members who aren't "in the know" don't stumble upon the spying code and reveal it. They have to snoop th…
Couldn't they just make a copy of the vm, isolate it, and then break into that one? sure the data will be "old", but not by a lot, and it would theoretically be undetectable.
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It's not just a matter of restraint. Large, well-financed companies can also afford to put some of their most capable staff on internal security.
> It's not just a matter of restraint. Large, well-financed companies can also afford to put some of their most capable staff on internal security. So how come the VW fiasco didn't get caught years ago?
It's not inevitable; much depends on employee culture.
On the other hand, look at Uber.
If libertarians don't realize that the system they're advocating for is essentially corporate feudalism, they're suckers. I'd rather have a powerful government accountable to voters than a powerful corporate oligarchy that is only accountable to shareholders.
I sold to Walmart for 4 years. In the beginning we believed we were lucky to become vendors. Then we realized how much stress they created. Every single year they would short pay our invoices. We would have to submit a claim with Walmart accounting. This process was completely and utterly time consuming. But the worst of it, they wouldn't pay the invoices owed until a year later. It's hard to float a $100,000 short p…
If you have a small business, you need to be very leery of having a large customer.
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> It's not just a matter of restraint. Large, well-financed companies can also afford to put some of their most capable staff on internal security. So how come the VW fiasco didn't get caught years ago?
Orders from the top and a lack of activist employees? It's not inevitable; much depends on employee culture. On the other hand, look at Uber.