Let’s be honest tho, what did they expect? In this case, Amazon gave them funding and a 4-year head start. The point of Alexa fund was to use Amazon money, and Alexa as a launch vehicle, to grow a product. Obviously Amazon had to gain something back.
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
#62Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
If you're building a competing product and using a monopoly in order to price gouge - nothing is throwaway.
The HN account is a throwaway, that's what they're talking about.
Re: Amazon met with startups about investing, then launched competing products
#63Re: Amazon met with startups about investing, then launched competing products
#64Am I the only one who thinks this is to be expected?
Stealing good ideas is literally amazon biggest strategy in retail. They monitor best selling products, then launch their own brand and crash the competition.
Why anyone expected them to change strategy with business ideas? This strategy served them well.
Re: Amazon met with startups about investing, then launched competing products
#65Earlier quoted context omitted.
I can confidently tell you that Amazon's employees cannot see customers data inside S3 buckets or EC2 instances. They are extremely serious about that stuff since they know that will erode their customer's confidence. But there's probably other superficial business data that's helpful to evaluate that.
Amazon is a massive company. How can you know this with confidence? Are you in the C-Suite?
It’s the thing they tell you the most when you work there. Like in a a obnoxious way. Most infosec training is about that.
If someone has access to customer’s data for their work they have to do a bunch of extra training and do other stuff. Potentially sign some things and there’s probably a different way to authenticate. I really don’t know because I never had to do that and nobody I knew had that type of access but I heard when you do you have to put with more things.
Re: Amazon met with startups about investing, then launched competing products
#66Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Are you still with Amazon?
Re: Amazon met with startups about investing, then launched competing products
#67I worked on the Echo Show team. The product had been in development for over a year when we invested in Nucleus. I remember thinking it was very strange that Amazon was investing in that company when we were building such a similar product internally.
Re: Amazon met with startups about investing, then launched competing products
#68"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…
There's a House of Reps. hearing on Online Platforms and Market Power next Monday with Bezos attending. If anyone has some staffer friends, could be a good line of questioning to poke them about.
Re: Amazon met with startups about investing, then launched competing products
#69Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
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Re: Amazon met with startups about investing, then launched competing products
#70Earlier quoted context omitted.
Amazon is a massive company. How can you know this with confidence? Are you in the C-Suite?
It’s the thing they tell you the most when you work there. Like in a a obnoxious way. Most infosec training is about that. If someone has access to customer’s data for their work they have to do a bunch of extra training and do other stuff. Potentially sign some things and there’s probably a different way to authenticate. I really don’t know because I never had to do that and nobody I knew had that type of access but…
But then what about other commenters saying that this is exactly what their sectors of the company do? Do you think it's impossible that a massive company like Amazon that controls an ungodly amount of the Internet would break those rules? Especially when the government of their home country hasn't pursued an antitrust case in God knows how long