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Lidl to Launch Rival to AWS

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Re: Lidl to Launch Rival to AWS

#331

Post by jonahbenton »

tyingq wrote: post #310
jonahbenton wrote: post #302

Sometimes I play a game with myself where I read the HN comments first, then read the piece. It's like watching a game of telephone. To my reading a) lidl is NOT launching an AWS competitor, per se b) this is all about the data and the power of the logistics platform Amazon is heavy in the food business. Amazon observes the use of any of its primitive services by any competitors to determine where growth is occurring…

"It's like watching a game of telephone" It's not really a mismatch of the comments and article though. The title of the article is "Lidl owner launching its own rival to Amazon Web Services" . And the body says things like "While Schwarz IT intends to use Europe’s enhanced data protection laws as a key differentiator to Amazon’s dominant service" . So perhaps you're right about the true purpose, but the article is c…

Yes- I didn't make the point well, but that's the point.

The game of telephone goes like-

* there's what I would guess to be reality * the things the article says, that distort from (what I would guess to be) reality * the things the headline says that distort from what the article says * the things most HN commenters who only read the headline say that distort yet further from the article and from reality

By reading some of the top HN comments, and then the article, I get to play this game backwards. This was a particularly good example.

I don't doubt that Lidl is building some platform for retailers and its supply chain to use. That's just good business.

And no doubt data protection plays some role in the strategy, though data protection is a right generally afforded individuals, and Lidl's focus will be commercial.

But these two paragraphs are particularly out of proportion:

    Schwarz Group, which owns both Lidl and Kaufland, is launching its own rival to Amazon Web Services (AWS) following the recent acquisition of software specialist Camao IDC
and

    The acquisition, which completed on May 1, brings 70 cloud specialists into the wider group representing key “resources in an important area of digitalisation”.
AWS probably hired 70 people in a couple of hours yesterday, dwarfed by Amazon as a whole, which probably hired 5,000.

Re: Lidl to Launch Rival to AWS

#332

Post by xnyan »

Merem wrote: post #291
usrusr wrote: post #278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Du/Sie and first name/last name are almost without exception divided along the same lines in German. Sie plus first name is how a person with extreme status expectations would address their butler, and just as old-fashioned. "I'm sorry you can never be my peer but I respect you anyways". Last name and Du would be using the last name as a nickname in a decidedly first name situation. Think "bro" but timeless.

"Sie" and first name was used at a smallish company (~50 employees) I worked at previously. It's just a combination of respect and familiarity. Additionally, several women really liked being called by their first name as it "made them feel less old".

This was common in the United States Southeast as a kid and still is to a lesser degree e.g. ”Miss Anne, please can I go outside?”

Re: Lidl to Launch Rival to AWS

#333

Post by eru »

collyw wrote: post #271
zaarn wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Last time Walmart tried to get a position in germany they just failed outright, nobody accepted the Walmart shopping culture here, not even the employees.

What's Wallmart shopping culture? I seem to remember them from spending time in Mexico 20 years ago. It was just a large supermarket from what I remember. Nothing especially unusual that I can remember.

Fish and water I guess?

Look up any of scores of articles that come up when you search for 'How to shop at Aldi?' (like eg https://www.gimmesomeoven.com/aldi-101-how-to-shop-at-aldi/) to see how German shopping culture works.

Oh, and Germans don't like greeters nor people to bag their groceries for them. When they see them, they suspect they could have saved 10 cents going to shop that doesn't have them instead.

(And baggers also violate the German sense of social equality, I guess?)

Re: Lidl to Launch Rival to AWS

#334

Post by eru »

VWWHFSfQ wrote: post #316
BiteCode_dev wrote: post #261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In opposition to the rules from the American authorities, which begets things like PRISM. Also, it's a matter of culture, the native law context of a company drives a lot of the things they do internally.

I can understand this. I would never prefer a German company if there was an equivalent American company providing the same service. In some ways it must feel like a loss of sovereignty to be so heavily reliant on American companies for necessary services. Google, Microsoft, Apple, Amazon, etc.

> I would never prefer a German company if there was an equivalent American company providing the same service.

Why?

Re: Lidl to Launch Rival to AWS

#335

Post by eru »

why_only_15 wrote: post #275
zwaps wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nobody would or should trust Amazon, an American company, to actually stand by those promises. It will syphon off any trade secrets and other infos, especially if the NSA asks. It has literally happened. I think after Snowden we should have gotten wise on how much official treaties and promises are worth. Before, this was the thinking of conspiracy nuts. Now it is prudent consideration. Germans would now, the US lite…

When has AWS siphoned off trade secrets from S3 or the like? Interested to hear about this because generally i've assumed that was impossible/illegal.

Well, it's not physically impossible.

But certainly illegal, certainly against contracts, and really, really bad for business.

Re: Lidl to Launch Rival to AWS

#336

Post by VWWHFSfQ »

eru wrote: post #334
VWWHFSfQ wrote: post #316

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can understand this. I would never prefer a German company if there was an equivalent American company providing the same service. In some ways it must feel like a loss of sovereignty to be so heavily reliant on American companies for necessary services. Google, Microsoft, Apple, Amazon, etc.

> I would never prefer a German company if there was an equivalent American company providing the same service. Why?

If the service and quality is equivalent then I would prefer to give my money to an American company since I'm American

Re: Lidl to Launch Rival to AWS

#337

Post by karussell »

d33 wrote: post #149
ThePhysicist wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We host a lot of our infrastructure on Hetzner Cloud and are very happy, but to be fair it's a long long shot away from what AWS offers. You basically only have compute, storage and networking, only three datacenters and two regions to choose from and no managed services at all. You also can't do advanced networking like announcing your own IP addresses (Hetzner only allows that in colocation). You also only have a f…

> RAM maxing out at 32 GB This part is just not accurate. I'm running their dedicated server with 256 GiB RAM right now.

For their dedicated servers you can have at least 712GB RAM.

But for their cloud offering the maximum is only 128GB RAM.

See https://www.hetzner.com/cloud and click on "dedicated vCPU". btw: do not confuse "dedicated vCPU" with dedicated server.

Re: Lidl to Launch Rival to AWS

#338

Post by rsynnott »

vidarh wrote: post #212
occamrazor wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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”.

> Yes, in German it’s a big deal, roughly the same as saying “Hey dude” instead of “Good morning Mr Smith”. It's been changing for decades across a lot of languages. I grew up in Norway where these forms were dying out as I was a child (70's/80's) and mostly used to older people, to the point where they're now mostly used sarcastically to imply someone is a pompous ass or to very old people or in very formal situatio…

Interestingly, English went the other direction; "you" is the old _formal_ form (the informal was "thou").

Re: Lidl to Launch Rival to AWS

#339

Post by wolfgke »

paganel wrote: post #134
benjohnson1707 wrote: post #96

Former 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…

> 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 agree though about the big difference between the German and US management. I have a close friend that works at the regional Lidl HQ and she got reprimanded just after being hired for having used the singular "you" (less formal) instead of the plural "you" (I'm not sure how it translates into German) when addressing herself to her bosses on the company's hallways

Using "du" instead of "Sie" for adressing people can be a very serious issue. If you do this to a policeman, for example, you can be fined by typically 600 € in Germany (source: https://www.bussgeldkatalog.org/beamtenbeleidigung/). To give an analogue in the English language: you wouldn't address your boss with "yo nigga". So I believe the reprimand was rather rightfully.

A rule in the German language is: in doubt, use the more formal language register. The "default language register" in German is typically "one register more formal" than the "default language register" in English.

Re: Lidl to Launch Rival to AWS

#340

Post by service_bus »

ThePhysicist wrote: post #126
SparklingCotton wrote: post #99

Many 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…

We host a lot of our infrastructure on Hetzner Cloud and are very happy, but to be fair it's a long long shot away from what AWS offers. You basically only have compute, storage and networking, only three datacenters and two regions to choose from and no managed services at all. You also can't do advanced networking like announcing your own IP addresses (Hetzner only allows that in colocation). You also only have a f…

Hetzner is great until you have some sort of issue.

They seem to either not have much in the way of internal procedures or just ignore them if they exist.

As long as you're prepared for all of your data and backups to just disappear, it's a great low-cost environment.

If you expect their operational team to not accidentally delete your environment, it just hasn't happened to you yet.

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