The other option is to partner up with Big Cloud. They all offer marketplace programs that let customers install third-party software quickly and easily, and take care of the billing too (for a price, of course).
When AWS, Azure, or GCP Becomes the Competition
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Re: When AWS, Azure, or GCP Becomes the Competition
#12The other option is to partner up with Big Cloud. They all offer marketplace programs that let customers install third-party software quickly and easily, and take care of the billing too (for a price, of course).
I address this in the article. Unfortunately (for the startup) being in one of the Big Cloud partner programs does not prevent them from launching directly competitive products.
Re: When AWS, Azure, or GCP Becomes the Competition
#13Earlier quoted context omitted.
Good question. While I think a bunch of nice people work there I have the feeling that the industry sees their opinions as quite controversial.
Ah, I had glanced at their landing page before posting above and just saw the product. I didn't realize they were outspoken about things. This makes more sense to me now.
Yes. They're all "own your Ops process, deploy on fridays" etc.
Re: When AWS, Azure, or GCP Becomes the Competition
#14If you're doing anything ML related your best bet is to niche down and solve a very narrow problem for a specific industry / market segment. Building generic AI tooling sounds great but rarely solves anyones problems.
Agreed. One of the possible differentiators I list in the article is being an "end-to-end solution." It's going to be a long while before AWS builds AI for accounting, or for optimizing industrial operations, or for... you get it.
Re: When AWS, Azure, or GCP Becomes the Competition
#15Wait, isn't it like any other market which already has long lasting players? If you want no competition -- find a new market (and win it). Otherwise you have to be smarter and faster than existing players.
You can probably draw a parallel between the retail sector and the phenomenon discussed in the article. For example:
Decades ago (before Walmart, Target, etc), it was common to have many small specialized stores that did just 1 thing really well (ie. selling just books, selling just shoes, selling just office supplies). Over time, Walmart/Target came along and bundled all of those specialty stores into 1 giant store that sells everything, causing a lot of the small specialty stores to eventually fade away.
AWS/GCP/Azure is sort of like the "Walmart of B2B Internet Services" in that they are in direct competition with companies like MongoDB, Akamai, and the other examples from the article re: offering comparable managed services.
As a market matures, the market consolidates into a small number a big players. To survive, specialty shops need to do things that the big players won't or can't, which I think the article does a good job discussing.
Re: When AWS, Azure, or GCP Becomes the Competition
#16There are many more examples that I did not include. Like Redis (and AWS Elasticache), MongoDB, Cassandra, Akamai (and AWS Cloudfront), etc. Any others?
Timescale/Influx, Neptune/multiple graphdbs, activeMQ/MQ, Kafka, Kubernetes, Hadoop/EMR, Athena/presto, Spark/Glue+Kinesis, Iron.io, even CloudWatch log insights eating other log platforms.
Re: When AWS, Azure, or GCP Becomes the Competition
#17Nice plug in the middle of middle of the article, exactly at the right spot:
> By the way, I write an article like this every month or so, covering lessons learned from growing B2B software startups. Get an email update when the next one is published
This is the closest I got to subscribing to a newsletter.
Re: When AWS, Azure, or GCP Becomes the Competition
#18Nice plug in the middle of middle of the article, exactly at the right spot: > By the way, I write an article like this every month or so, covering lessons learned from growing B2B software startups. Get an email update when the next one is published This is the closest I got to subscribing to a newsletter.
> This is the closest I got to subscribing to a newsletter.
Almost got you, huh? :)
I've A/B tested various locations and the inline-embed is the best, by far. This is also why many news sites now include related stories in the middle of the article, not at the end.
Re: When AWS, Azure, or GCP Becomes the Competition
#19The other option is to partner up with Big Cloud. They all offer marketplace programs that let customers install third-party software quickly and easily, and take care of the billing too (for a price, of course).
I address this in the article. Unfortunately (for the startup) being in one of the Big Cloud partner programs does not prevent them from launching directly competitive products.
It probably only makes it easier for them as well since they can see what add ons/tools are the most consumed. Then they can use that data to figure out what features they should build next for their tools
Re: When AWS, Azure, or GCP Becomes the Competition
#20It misses a couple of big ones: 1. Offer a great user experience. Many cloud providers are just pumping products out the door with little to no concern for UX. 2. Have great personality. That could be through offering outstanding support, or through being the kind of company that people root for. (Honeycomb.io is a good example of this.)
Of the many people who hated Microsoft during their rise to power, one of the most coherent groups were people who were mad because MS put a competitor with an arguably better product out of business.
That is in fact how FUD got into the vernacular. They would make vague promises that you couldn't quite call outright lies about having a product coming in that market, and a year later they'd put out something tepid (thereby proving they were lying about their progress earlier), but with some bulk licensing deal.
By the time the MS product came out the competitor would already be experiencing reduced sales growth because people would play wait-and-see for the MS product.
There is nothing stopping any of these folks from pulling the same trick. Having a better product will not save you. A brilliant product might, but even that's not a given.