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Lidl to Launch Rival to AWS
171–180 of 516 posts
Re: Lidl to Launch Rival to AWS
#172I'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…
That seems overly stereotyped. North American companies that fail to innovate do so at their own peril. They languish, and eventually become irrelevant. Kodak, Sears, RIM (Blackberry) come to mind. So do the non-Tesla US car companies. General Motors, Ford Motor Company, and Fiat Chrysler Automobiles.
Re: Lidl to Launch Rival to AWS
#173Former Schwarz employee here: The company made SO much money in the past 4 decades with big box / discount retailing, you won't believe it. Salaries are off the charts (it would make senior software engineers in SV look pale). Hubris is as well. The only thing that drives reasoning are statements like 'we're not just some random company, we're Schwarz Group'. It's the poster child Corp described by Andy Gorves statem…
I worked in the Real Estate Dept at Lidl for a (very) short time, awful company. Never have I seen people being treated so badly, especially in stores.
Their IT was an absolute joke back then, we had to use a 20-year-old ERP and most of the work was done on paper. Thinking that these guys could take on AWS sounds ludicrous to me. However, they are cost-killers and hyper-aggressive when it comes to selling, so this might even work...
Re: Lidl to Launch Rival to AWS
#174If Hetzner ( Also from Germany ) cant / isn't competing with AWS, why does Lidl thinks they can? It then also mention Delivery in UK, and ecommerce projects . Which makes me doubt if the publication knows what AWS really is. The whole piece ( If you can even call it a piece ) is very poor reporting, to the point I am thinking of should I be flagging this. Edit: Please Read Comment by Cu3PO42 https://news.ycombinator.…
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Re: Lidl to Launch Rival to AWS
#175Earlier quoted context omitted.
Just out of curiosity what do you do that earns you 100k in Italy if I may ask? Most Italians I met working in Austria and Germany left Italy because of low salaries and they're not making anything close to 100k here either. I've even met Italians who moved to Eastern Europe for higher tech salaries than back home so something doesn't add up.
Can confirm. As senior software developer I made 25K EUR in 2019.
That's a very poor salary for your job, if you don't mind me saying. Are you in Italy? What's the cost of living like?
Salaries in Europe are generally quite low for devs compared to the US. I think it's best in the UK.
Starting salary will average ~£25k, rising to ~£35k as you get more senior, then maybe £~45-55k one you're 5-10 years in.
This is excluding London and contract-based work, of course.
Re: Lidl to Launch Rival to AWS
#176This is not was the original source says (in German and behind paywall: https://www.lebensmittelzeitung.net/tech-logistik/Lidl-und-K...).
It is not clear if the cloud will be publicly available for customers and therefore a rival to AWS.
Re: Lidl to Launch Rival to AWS
#177There's definitely more of an opportunity in EU cloud services than you might think.
I work for a pretty big EU university (~50000 users) and there is very little AWS/Azure/Google we can actually legally use. And this isn't a case of "bureaucracy gone mad" either, there are some real concerns with the big cloud providers that the rest of the world doesnt seem to have the time or the energy to tackle.
Another thing is that AWS/Azure/Google are getting _super_ complex. The idea of a back to basics cloud provider that fully complies with GDPR might actually be a compelling offering.
That said- whether this kind of tech can come from a budget supermarket chain in Germany is another thing all together. Despite the hype, not much exportable tech actually comes out of Berlin, and its not clear that they have the breadth and depth of expertise in "open source at scale" to make this actually happen. But on the other hand- who knows? Will be interesting to see.
Re: Lidl to Launch Rival to AWS
#178Many good reasons why this would work in Europe. - Logistics in Germany is awesome, and Amazon really doesn't have a leg up on the already existing logistics solutions there. - For a cloud provider, negotiating deals now when AMD is on the rise must be perfect. - Beating AWS on EC2 pricing is easy. AWS EC2 pricing is insanely expensive. German providers like Hetzner Cloud entered the market at 1/10th of the EC2 price…
Also, "my data is handled by a company under the EU law" is quite a good sale pitch these days.
It is not.
Re: Lidl to Launch Rival to AWS
#179Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Salaries are off the charts Just to add another data point, Lidl is also the retailer that pays the best market salaries in the Eastern-European country where I live in (they actually included that in several of their hiring ads), and I'm talking about shop people like cashiers and the people that put things on the shelves. > They are getting into the car sales and recycle business as well. In here they've also ope…
I guess you mean the 2nd person form (du or ihr fir singular or plural) instead of the 3rd person plural (Sie), which is the courtesy form fir singular and plural. Yes, in German it’s a big deal, roughly the same as saying “Hey dude” instead of “Good morning Mr Smith”.
Parent says Eastern European country, well, I had the bad luck to be born in Hungary (am Canadian now), and I fully understand what happened. It's a generation divide. I am 45 and I am one of the oldest for whom it doesn't matter and looks downright outdated but even to many in my age cohort and especially older it's exceptionally offensive, irrespectful to use the familiar form of "you". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hungarian_noun_phrase#Forms_fo... With a huge emphasis on irrespectful -- it's downright disdainful to call someone so without asking for permission to address them so. There is a tradition -- or rather was -- where they used to toast on the occassion of switching from formal address to informal. It's that big of a deal: there was a ritual, simple as it was, on switching the form of address. In the 1920-30s the gendarmerie used to address everyone informally and it was really offensive and a form of asserting dominance -- it was always the superior, the elder who offered the inferior, the younger to switch from formal to informal thus the gendarmerie not even offering just using it declared they are vastly superior to everyone. And the phrase still exists for such offensive behaviour. It really is -- or rather was -- a big deal.
I am saying, it was, because starting the late 90s with the spread of Internet and pseudo-anonimity all this just became outdated -- you had no idea whom you are talking to so observing the old rules were impossible. And those who have grown up with this simply didn't bother learning the rules. For me, when I was 18, it was a Big Deal that at our high school graduation party our class leader teacher allowed everyone to switch from formal to informal. It was basically the only time in my life when something like that happened, then I started using the 'Net shortly after (all this was in '93) and this stuff was just washed away.
Re: Lidl to Launch Rival to AWS
#180Many good reasons why this would work in Europe. - Logistics in Germany is awesome, and Amazon really doesn't have a leg up on the already existing logistics solutions there. - For a cloud provider, negotiating deals now when AMD is on the rise must be perfect. - Beating AWS on EC2 pricing is easy. AWS EC2 pricing is insanely expensive. German providers like Hetzner Cloud entered the market at 1/10th of the EC2 price…
Also, for online retailers to put their eggs in Amazon's basket means they put their destiny in the hands of a competitor. Going for example with Azure is safer from this perspective.
That said, Lidl is closer to Amazon than Microsoft, from that point of view.