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Not as sinister as it seems. You could also not be approached for investment, launch your product, then get killed by a competing product from a big company, all the same.
Not as sinister as it seems. You could also not be approached for investment, launch your product, then get killed by a competing product from a big company, all the same.
I agree though that it’s not as sinister as it initially seems. Companies create competition at times to stimulate product development even though it’s a shitty operating mode for the ground soldiers involved. In that case though they’re spending entirely of their own resources and not leeching off other investments to actively undermine a successful exit.
Perhaps startups are undervaluing their IP if this behavior is able to manifest easily. And in light of this news I’d be super hesitant as a board to allow any money from Amazon whatsoever.
I bet you Amazon thought of this before that company even formed. That's not an original idea.
You can read more about it here:
https://jacquesmattheij.com/the-several-million-dollar-bug/
So I totally believe that the seed for the idea came from somewhere else.
"An Amazon spokesman said the company doesn’t use confidential information that companies share with it to build competing products" Maybe...but in the past, AWS proactively looked at traction of products hosted on its platform, built competing products, and then scraped & targeted customer list of those hosted products. In fact, I was on a team in AWS that did exactly that. Why wouldn't their investing arm do the sa…
Just ... wow. This is an egregious abuse of monopoly power and is exactly the kind of thing that antitrust laws are supposed to address. I was certainly naive when I heard about other big retailers who would refuse to allow any subcontractors to use AWS. "Surely Amazon has a Chinese wall" to prevent that kind of data sharing, I thought. Never underestimate the lack of morals in business is the right answer I guess.
"An Amazon spokesman said the company doesn’t use confidential information that companies share with it to build competing products" Maybe...but in the past, AWS proactively looked at traction of products hosted on its platform, built competing products, and then scraped & targeted customer list of those hosted products. In fact, I was on a team in AWS that did exactly that. Why wouldn't their investing arm do the sa…
When I was at Google, we were encouraged by our lawyers not to worry about patents or unique parts of any product. If there ever will be a claim, they will drown the company in legal fees, so nobody is going to dare to sue us. Patents were used, in many cases, as a form of research into a new area.
History repeats itself. This is straight out of Microsoft's playbook from back in the day.
"An Amazon spokesman said the company doesn’t use confidential information that companies share with it to build competing products" Maybe...but in the past, AWS proactively looked at traction of products hosted on its platform, built competing products, and then scraped & targeted customer list of those hosted products. In fact, I was on a team in AWS that did exactly that. Why wouldn't their investing arm do the sa…
Wow. I understand you do this as a throwaway but if true this is very bad stuff and it would be nice to have a lot more substantiation so that it could be verified.
"An Amazon spokesman said the company doesn’t use confidential information that companies share with it to build competing products" Maybe...but in the past, AWS proactively looked at traction of products hosted on its platform, built competing products, and then scraped & targeted customer list of those hosted products. In fact, I was on a team in AWS that did exactly that. Why wouldn't their investing arm do the sa…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Cannot up vote this enough. During my time both at Retail and AWS it was perfectly normal to trawl production customer data and come up with ideas to launch competing products. Prices were always set lower or free offering justified as data-driven and customer obsession. I hated the gas lighting their customers and left in disgust of the company and its leadership which encourages that behavior.
What types of AWS data would be trawled? Are we talking about data inside S3 buckets, database schemas, particular architecure styles, the fact that a product is consuming {x, y, z} amounts of cloud resources, or simply "spending $m / year" in gross?
But there's probably other superficial business data that's helpful to evaluate that.