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Lidl to Launch Rival to AWS

chargedretail.co.uk

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Re: Lidl to Launch Rival to AWS

#81

Post by mschuster91 »

mikorym wrote: post #69
runj__ wrote: post #5

In Sweden Lidl is know for being suspiciously cheap, they're even playing on it in their ads here. They had a marketing stunt where a chef started a luxury pop-up restaurant and the payoff was that it was all Lidl ingredients. "You can cook good food EVEN though you're using Lidl stuff" I'm not 100% sure that's what I want of a cloud provider.

I come from an agricultural background and all of the farmers I know always get less than 50% of the price of what you pay in the supermarket. Change that 50% to >80% and you get Lidl and Aldi for the exact same produce . I am not sure why it works like that. These days you get direct to supermarket more often (taking out Fresh Produce Markets) but again—it's not direct to consumer. Personally, I think it's more beca…

> Personally, I think it's more because of the retailers being cutthroats than any other reason.

It's rare that supermarket chains have direct contracts with farmers. Usually there are one to three middle men in the chain that all want their cut - on the farmer side a cooperative or other association (e.g. with milk it's common that a milk processor buys the milk from the farmers and then sells the processed milk on), then wholesale markets, and finally cooperatives on the supermarket chain themselves - for example, the supermarket chain "Edeka" actually not only runs their own stores, but also is a cooperative of independent store owners, as their name "Einkaufsgenossenschaft der Kolonialwarenhändler" reflects.

Re: Lidl to Launch Rival to AWS

#82

Post by hobofan »

hotgeart wrote: post #27
abhisuri97 wrote: post #3

Ignorant American here who has never heard of Lidl/Schwarz Group before. Is there anything in their history that would show that they know how to do compute? Is their infrastructure right now really solid/better than AWS?

European (BE) here, no. They are just know for being cheap stores and have time to time crazy promo on an limited article. You can't even rly do all of your groceries there. Unless you only eat frozen chickens, chips, soda and vegetable cans. Their website is slow af btw (4s to display a detail page). So if they want to do an AWS like. They'll need to invest. Its not like Amazon : hey we've a bunch of unused servers…

> hey we've a bunch of unused servers why we don't rent them?

That's not the origin story of AWS. That myth has been debunked numerous times.

Re: Lidl to Launch Rival to AWS

#83

Post by forkerenok »

barbecue_sauce wrote: post #73
bflesch wrote: post #60

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 refus…

I've only been to Lidls in the US, but their stores seem pretty streamlined to me.

I think GP means that they are unwilling to open up their logistics mojo to other efforts in fears that it would interfere with their well-run retail operations.

Re: Lidl to Launch Rival to AWS

#84

Post by patagona »

Cu3PO42 wrote: post #16

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…

Not saying Schwarz (the parent company) won't try and run their own cloud provider, but I doubt the acquisition has much to do with that at all.

Also, the german link above doesn't even mention the acquisition and the german source for the english article (from "Lebensmittel Zeitung") doesn't talk about "cloud specialists" either.

CAMAO IDC is a software development company (who knows how to use the cloud), they're not "cloud specialists" in the sense that they know how to run a cloud provider.

Source: I work there

Re: Lidl to Launch Rival to AWS

#85

Post by luckylion »

onion2k wrote: post #22
rjknight wrote: post #17

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.

It's Lidl's parent company that's launching the service, after buying a cloud provider. The headline is just stupid. It's equivalent to an article titled "Whole Foods runs AWS".

No. Whole Foods is one of many Amazon ventures, but not the most significant. Supermarkets (Lidl and Kaufland chains, mostly) are the main business of Schwarz Group.

It's more like saying "Google will do X" when it's technically Alphabet that spawns X.

Re: Lidl to Launch Rival to AWS

#86

Post by ChuckNorris89 »

bflesch wrote: post #60

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 refus…

>building fancy pilots all day, but refuse roll them out because it will cannibalize their core business

That's the big difference I've noticed between German and US companies.

In German companies if you are an exec that brought success to the company in the past then your word is the law and focus is on keeping the status quo and make sure that any new ventures don't make existing higher ups obsolete.

Whereas in US tech companies innovation is the primary focus regardless if someone's division ends up obsolete and needs to be let go. Famous examples being how Netflix pivoted from DVD rentals or Tony Fadell, creator of the iPod who was tasked on delivering an iPhone prototype back in the day and failed as his team's design was basically an iPod based phone which lost in favor of the current iOS iPhone we all know today. During the live iPhone launch demo, Steve Jobs deletes his contact from the favorites list basically saying "you're fired" and the rest is history.

You won't see something like this in a German company where age and experience in the company is more valued than being a visionary for future market trends. That's why you'll never see the big German car manufacturers pull off a Tesla even though they have more resources. Can't pivot and cannibalize the current products and have to shit-can some famous higher ups that were successful in the past.

Re: Lidl to Launch Rival to AWS

#87

Post by mhast »

TomMarius wrote: post #50
Eikon wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lidl is not world class, it’s just cheap.

It is maybe not world class, but compared to other options in EU, it's first class

I have never been in a Lidl Store I would consider "first class". It's not bad products but they have a few factors that severely limit the impressions.

They mostly only carry their own brand with extremely limited options. If you want orange marmalade they have one style from one brand (their own). If you want some other style, find a different store. (This is the case with most of their items besides a small additional selection of eg certain candy, but still very sparse compared to other stores.)

Most items are set up in bulk on the cargo carriers it comes on. Although this is probably also a lot for show to give a "price consious" appeal.

They tend to have a significant part of the store dedicated to whatever random garbage they got a good deal on. Sometimes it's a boardgame, sometimes it's a stuffed animal, sometimes it's a power tool. Usually decent quality, but rarely the best.

For me I put Lidl in the class of store where you have to make multiple trips to different stores. If I'm cooking I can rarely go only to Lidl. You usually go there to buy some of the stuff you need but then get the rest at some other store with more items.

Re: Lidl to Launch Rival to AWS

#88

Post by speedgoose »

discodave wrote: post #76
speedgoose wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some cloud providers have a lot fewer employees and are doing well. They don't have as many features compared to EC2 and VPC but it's not a major problem for them.

If you're talking about GCP, and MS, then they have thousands of engineers too. If you're talking about Digital Ocean, Mongo, and other medium sized players, then I only give them a couple more years before things get really ugly.

Yes I'm thinking about smaller players. I would bet GCP will be cancelled before most of the small players give up.

Re: Lidl to Launch Rival to AWS

#89

Post by gridlockd »

estsauver wrote: post #8

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 SA…

Cancelling SAP is a sign that they can avoid sunk cost fallacy, which is good.

Re: Lidl to Launch Rival to AWS

#90

Post by luch »

mschuster91 wrote: post #70
vertex-four wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> There's a serious cultural issue there. Said "cultural issue" is the reason why the GDPR was implemented in the first place! It was not European ad-tech running wild tracking people all over the place so hard that even the notoriously slow and complex EU parliament had no choice but to act in the interest of their constituents.

Let's not kid ourselves : European ad-tech companies are not substantially more ethical than their American counterparts.

GDPR (even with its current clumsy implementation) is a much needed piece of legislation since the data processing market have no economic interest in "behaving" ethically.

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