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Amazon Cloud Drive and Amazon Cloud Player

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Re: Amazon Cloud Drive and Amazon Cloud Player

#101

Post by fierarul »

jasonkester wrote: post #89

This is actually a little bit worrying as an entrepreneur building things on top of Amazon's Web Services. Amazon has always made a point of not building services on top of its Cloud offerings that directly compete with its users. Cloud Drive sets a precedent for them as the first time they've gone against that principle. There are lots of "low hanging fruit" companies that were built on the understanding that Amazon…

Why wouldn't Amazon choose to implement one of those 'low hanging fruit' kind of features? They seem the most logical to approach first.

Re: Amazon Cloud Drive and Amazon Cloud Player

#102

Post by fierarul »

jasonkester wrote: post #89

This is actually a little bit worrying as an entrepreneur building things on top of Amazon's Web Services. Amazon has always made a point of not building services on top of its Cloud offerings that directly compete with its users. Cloud Drive sets a precedent for them as the first time they've gone against that principle. There are lots of "low hanging fruit" companies that were built on the understanding that Amazon…

Why wouldn't Amazon choose to implement one of those 'low hanging fruit' kind of features? They seem the most logical to approach first.

Re: Amazon Cloud Drive and Amazon Cloud Player

#103

Post by zmmmmm »

swombat wrote: post #97
jasonkester wrote: post #89

This is actually a little bit worrying as an entrepreneur building things on top of Amazon's Web Services. Amazon has always made a point of not building services on top of its Cloud offerings that directly compete with its users. Cloud Drive sets a precedent for them as the first time they've gone against that principle. There are lots of "low hanging fruit" companies that were built on the understanding that Amazon…

I've said it before, I'll say it again: ( http://swombat.com/2011/2/22/predictability-of-closed-platfo... ) > I would argue that only one thing is entirely predictable about closed platforms: they will do whatever is in the business's interest. When building your business on someone else's platform, you should always assume that if it is in the platform owner's interest, they will shut you down tomorrow with no warni…

Which is all the more poignant because at a higher level here we have Amazon confidently building on Google's platform, in direct competition with Google's own services, knowing they can do so without prejudice.

Amongst all the argument about "open"-ness and what it means, whether it's source code or something else - for me this is the important part. If a competitor can build on a platform and safely do so in competition with the interests of the platform owner then that platform is "open" in the real sense that matters.

Re: Amazon Cloud Drive and Amazon Cloud Player

#104

Post by tybris »

swombat wrote: post #97
jasonkester wrote: post #89

This is actually a little bit worrying as an entrepreneur building things on top of Amazon's Web Services. Amazon has always made a point of not building services on top of its Cloud offerings that directly compete with its users. Cloud Drive sets a precedent for them as the first time they've gone against that principle. There are lots of "low hanging fruit" companies that were built on the understanding that Amazon…

I've said it before, I'll say it again: ( http://swombat.com/2011/2/22/predictability-of-closed-platfo... ) > I would argue that only one thing is entirely predictable about closed platforms: they will do whatever is in the business's interest. When building your business on someone else's platform, you should always assume that if it is in the platform owner's interest, they will shut you down tomorrow with no warni…

I don't think that's quite comparable. Contrary to platforms like Google App Engine or iOS, the core infrastructure AWS offers is sufficiently open and commonplace that you wouldn't have such a hard time moving away from them in the unlikely event that they'll throw you out. This is simply a case of a much more classical business dilemma: a big company decides to build a product that competes with your small company. The somewhat strange thing about this case is that the big company is also providing the infrastructure for your small company so they win regardless of whichever product wins, but not at the cost of the small company's ability to build a better product.

Re: Amazon Cloud Drive and Amazon Cloud Player

#105

Post by guelo »

jasonkester wrote: post #89

This is actually a little bit worrying as an entrepreneur building things on top of Amazon's Web Services. Amazon has always made a point of not building services on top of its Cloud offerings that directly compete with its users. Cloud Drive sets a precedent for them as the first time they've gone against that principle. There are lots of "low hanging fruit" companies that were built on the understanding that Amazon…

This doesn't make sense. This isn't like Facebook or iOS where you are a sharecropper working their platform and they can pull the rug from under you at anytime. The platform here is the web, Amazon doesn't own the web, any company you build on the web could attract competition from anybody else. Building your business on top of Amazon's top-notch infrastructure doesn't give Amazon any advantage if they decide to compete against you. And nothing would stop you from moving off of their stuff if it did. I don't know why anyone would have the "understanding" that Amazon wasn't going to compete against them. Amazon's cloud actually evens the playing field, there's nothing stopping you from building a bookstore and competing against Amazon using their own servers against them.

In short, your complaint doesn't make sense.

Re: Amazon Cloud Drive and Amazon Cloud Player

#106

Post by revorad »

slackerIII wrote: post #33
jonursenbach wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Didn't Audiogalaxy used to be a P2P service in the early 00s?

It did. We are some of the same folks, but a totally different service now.

Thank you, thank you, thank you for making Audiogalaxy which introduced me to my favourite music of all times, back in the day.

Re: Amazon Cloud Drive and Amazon Cloud Player

#107

Post by jasonkester »

fierarul wrote: post #101
jasonkester wrote: post #89

This is actually a little bit worrying as an entrepreneur building things on top of Amazon's Web Services. Amazon has always made a point of not building services on top of its Cloud offerings that directly compete with its users. Cloud Drive sets a precedent for them as the first time they've gone against that principle. There are lots of "low hanging fruit" companies that were built on the understanding that Amazon…

Why wouldn't Amazon choose to implement one of those 'low hanging fruit' kind of features? They seem the most logical to approach first.

Because if they establish a reputation of watching what people are building on their platform, then copying it and driving those businesses out of the market, they'll alienate their developer community.

Re: Amazon Cloud Drive and Amazon Cloud Player

#108

Post by jasonkester »

guelo wrote: post #105
jasonkester wrote: post #89

This is actually a little bit worrying as an entrepreneur building things on top of Amazon's Web Services. Amazon has always made a point of not building services on top of its Cloud offerings that directly compete with its users. Cloud Drive sets a precedent for them as the first time they've gone against that principle. There are lots of "low hanging fruit" companies that were built on the understanding that Amazon…

This doesn't make sense. This isn't like Facebook or iOS where you are a sharecropper working their platform and they can pull the rug from under you at anytime. The platform here is the web, Amazon doesn't own the web, any company you build on the web could attract competition from anybody else. Building your business on top of Amazon's top-notch infrastructure doesn't give Amazon any advantage if they decide to com…

The products I mention are things like Cloud Monitoring tools, Management services for your AWS instances, and other things specific to Amazon Web Services. One of my products, for example, is a service that runs detailed reports on the usage logs that Amazon generates for Cloudfront and S3. Amazon could wipe it out completely with a feature that wouldn't even make the front page here.

They've deliberately stayed away from those areas that have products in them. You're right though that this is one area where "AWS" wasn't a necessary component for the service in question. That could help explain why they're comfortable doing it.

Re: Amazon Cloud Drive and Amazon Cloud Player

#109

Post by dchest »

dstein64 wrote: post #37

I tried uploading a file to the cloud drive using Chrome, and then I viewed the file. I copied the URL and pasted it into Firefox, where I was not logged in to amazon.com or their cloud storage. It still loaded the file. If you tried doing this with a gmail message, gmail would prompt you to log in. I am not too familiar with cloud storage. Is this a security issue?

It didn't work for me:

  SignatureDoesNotMatch
  
  The request signature we calculated does not match the signature you provided.

Re: Amazon Cloud Drive and Amazon Cloud Player

#110

Post by ripdog »

slackerIII wrote: post #27

If you want a free service to stream your music from your home computer to your work computer/android/iOS device, check out my service: http://www.audiogalaxy.com Since we don't store the music in the cloud, we don't have any size limits (the current winner has about 530,000 files). Obviously this only works if you leave your home computer on, but we've found that isn't a problem for most folks.

I'm currently using subsonic on my home server to stream my music, subsonic is guaranteed to be free forever, is open source, runs anywhere java does, transcodes formats, does video, allows downloads/uploads, has multiple full-featured mobile apps for almost every mobile platform, pretty much everything you could want. Setup is easy as pie, and it will even give you a subdomain in subsonic.org if you donate to the developer.

As far as I can see, your service is subsonic + the hassle of registering, yet another company with your personal details, less features and the possibility that it may become a freemium service in the future.

So, what, exactly, does your service offer?

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