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Amazon met with startups about investing, then launched competing products

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Re: Amazon met with startups about investing, then launched competing products

#41

Post by former-googler »

ggl_thorwaway wrote: post #25
throwaway_aws wrote: post #12

"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.

Not my google experience. They do say not worrying about patents, but that's because searching for patents could indeed make you liable as you were influenced by prior art.

Nobody at google even remotely mentioned "we will drown them in legal fees".

If anything, I have a huge respect for google legal.

Disclaimer: former googler.

Re: Amazon met with startups about investing, then launched competing products

#42

Post by bdefore »

throwaway_aws wrote: post #12

"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…

Would Amazon be more, less, or equally liable if you used a cloud provider that then relied upon AWS for its hosting.

How would a startup that was concerned of Amazon copying it be certain to avoid such surveillance other than running its own data center?

Re: Amazon met with startups about investing, then launched competing products

#43

Post by [deleted] »

ggl_thorwaway wrote: post #25
throwaway_aws wrote: post #12

"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.

[deleted]

Re: Amazon met with startups about investing, then launched competing products

#44

Post by throwaway_aws »

jacquesm wrote: post #30
throwaway_aws wrote: post #12

"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.

I wish I could reveal team and product name... but that would be a career suicide. I'm not asking you to believe what I'm saying... but I truly am sharing my experience. I'd encourage you to talk to folks you know from AWS who were there for last 8-10 years.

Re: Amazon met with startups about investing, then launched competing products

#47

Post by dboreham »

jacquesm wrote: post #33
tekcyb-org wrote: post #6

I bet you Amazon thought of this before that company even formed. That's not an original idea.

For the longest time (more than a decade) I ran a small company ( All that time I thought: next week someone else is going to clue in to this, it is so obvious. But nobody ever did. 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.

Isn't this more to do with how TCP and the socket interface is implemented (or more accurately its intended semantics) than a bug in browsers? Not draining any inbound data on a new connection prior to sending my request doesn't sound like a bug.

Re: Amazon met with startups about investing, then launched competing products

#48

Post by speeder »

ggl_thorwaway wrote: post #25
throwaway_aws wrote: post #12

"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.

That is actually patents working as intended.

Unfortunately the way patent law works now, make patents usually not work unless someone is ignoring the law.

Patents were created to give a reason for people to publish their "secret sauce" in a public manner, so anyone could read and copy them or create new products based on the patent.

If you DON'T want your product copied, the correct course of action instead is make it secret, for example this is what Coca-Cola does (they rarely, if ever, patent their products, and they hide the best they can their recipes and processes)

Re: Amazon met with startups about investing, then launched competing products

#49

Post by ngngngng »

toyg wrote: post #13

Silicon Valley is clearly not a comedy: https://youtu.be/JlwwVuSUUfc

> It's like when somebody says they want to go birding with you, but really they just want to get you alone in the woods so they can take your binoculars.

Re: Amazon met with startups about investing, then launched competing products

#50

Post by xyzzy_plugh »

bigpumpkin wrote: post #2

"In 2016, a group of investors led by the Alexa Fund bought a stake in Nucleus, a small company that made a home-video communication device that integrated with the Alexa voice assistant. Nucleus’s founders and the venture-capital funds investing alongside the Alexa Fund had reservations about collaborating with an Amazon-backed firm, according to some of the co-investors. " "After striking the deal, the Alexa Fund g…

The Echo Show was conceived before the first Echo was ever released. I think I even saw a demo in 2014/2015. Source: I worked on the first Echo.
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