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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

#81

Post by ibejoeb »

TimSchumann wrote: post #76
whoisjuan wrote: post #40

Earlier 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.

> I can confidently tell you that Amazon's employees cannot see customers data inside S3 buckets or EC2 instances. From a technical standpoint, that statement is false. Every employee might not have the credentials to, but for AWS to function as it does, SOMEONE inside the company has to have those credentials. If you change 'cannot' to 'don't', well then we've just gotta take you at your word, which is where we star…

The critical factor here is whether there are controls in place to prevent it. Sure, somebody probably could, but what to what lengths must that person go to do it, and what happens when it is discovered? Most things are not technically impossible, after all.

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

#82

Post by KorfmannArno »

bg24 wrote: post #53
rckoepke wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Can speak for AWS. Only the later. Basically the usage information for cloud resources. This constitutes the foundation for billing. BTW, this is be true for any cloud, any SAAS. There is no way an employee can look into customer data. There's enough trail inside AWS to prove that without any doubt.

What are the measures being implemented to ensure that no employee can look into customer's data?

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

#83

Post by mhoad »

atarian wrote: post #73
NicoJuicy wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And that's why existing businesses joining the cloud pick azure.

What makes you think Microsoft would behave differently?

I presume it would be a lack of history doing the exact thing amazon are accused of doing here? That and the fact that they aren’t doing an e-commerce business in the way Amazon is.

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

#84

Post by [deleted] »

throwaway_aws wrote: post #44
jacquesm wrote: post #30

Earlier 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.

[deleted]

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

#85

Post by riyadparvez »

former-googler wrote: post #41
ggl_thorwaway wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> 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.

I've heard the same thing in startups and other companies. This is not something unique to Google.

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

#87

Post by gentleman11 »

Standard advice to to not keep your startup secret but to talk about openly to as many people as possible. Eg, quotes about how only 1/1000 startups die to competition, and the rest self destruct or fail to get traction.

Is that still the case?

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

#88

Post by ivalm »

This is a bit complicated. I’m not in Amazon but work for a (very large) org. Often we will have some product in mind and approach/maybe even partner with a vendor while at the same time having an internal effort. Occasionally we go with an internally developed solution, sometimes we go with vendor solution. I am sure some vendors feel bad that suddenly they are forced out by a “similar” internal product. However, in every case I’ve been involved it wasn’t sinister. There was a business need and the company actively invested into multiple parallel solutions, eventually an internal solution won after we used a vendor solution for some years(but sometimes it is the vendor that wins!).

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

#89

Post by darawk »

Isn't this just what you would expect a company of this size to do?

"We want to launch a product in category X"

"Ok, should we roll it ourselves, or buy something?"

"Well, let's interview a few companies, see if there's any we like, and if not, we'll make it ourselves"

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

#90

Post by cheez »

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…

Funny... I have software that combines well with something that has an online app store. They've been begging me to put my stuff in there. Nothing doing, I seen how you guys have embraced and extinguished others. They just took out their biggest app on the app store with their own version.
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