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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

#101

Post by thisisnico »

speeder wrote: post #48
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.

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…

Those are then described as trade secrets and have their own protections as well.

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

#102

Post by rattray »

aaronbrethorst wrote: post #94
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…

As it happens, the Congresswoman who represents the part of Seattle that contains Amazon is on the House Judiciary committee, and may also very well be your member of Congress. Seems like something her office would probably want to know about if you could substantiate the claim. https://www.wsha.org/policy-advocacy/legislative/u-s-congres... (ignore the odd source of the link. it's the only place I could find her CoS…

It didn't sound like GP was saying their team did anything illegal – they accessed _public_ information about the companies they were copying.

It definitely feels scummy, but it didn't sound like GP had access to evidence of a crime. IANAL.

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

#103

Post by yandie »

KorfmannArno wrote: post #82
bg24 wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I used to work for AWS and had to deep dive into IAM to build a feature.

Basically Everytime you touch AWS your session is tagged with your credentials and has a unique ID. So everything downstream you touch has your session ID associated with it.

Now say somebody from Redshift wants to access the customer's data. They will then need to access to the encryption key in KMS. The trail will be there since KMS lives in the customer's account (you can audit your own access). And for production services, human actors cannot access these keys - only production credentials can. An engineer who can log into a prod host in theory can grab the temporary credentials there but it expires in 15 minutes so your trail will be rather visible. Also access to prod host has a high bar - only senior people can do it.

Now in theory somebody can coordinate with a malicious user in KMS team - but the bar is high. Also the actual master key never leaves the premise for KMS so your attack surface is very limited.

Of course there are some core teams like IAM and KMS where if they become vulnerable the whole thing falls apart. But that's a big stretch for those systems since they are the core to the business.

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

#104

Post by jariel »

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #29
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…

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.

Amazon does not access private S3/Ec3 data for retail competitive purposes.

The comments above indicating 'well someone has access' - yea, obviously, it's data hosting. Someone has access.

But the amount of conspiracy here is frustrating.

Amazon will play very aggressively within the bounds of the law, meaning, if they can glean public info about something, or look at their own sales data for a product, they will do that.

But to look at s3 data would risk the entire empire.

It's rational for people to be a bit skeptical, and so Walmart can say 'no data on AWS' but it's also an easy thing to do.

Now - is it possible that new retail PM, who used to be an AWS PM, and who for some reason still had access to things he shouldn't - went ahead and did that? That could happen. And maybe his boss finds out and looks the other way but calls IT and tries to have the loophole closed quietly. Etc.

As a policy are they trying to copy your product and even ask you for information and aggressively pursue customer data? Yes.

As a policy are they looking at your S3/ec2 data - no.

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

#106

Post by hodgesrm »

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…

> "An Amazon spokesman said the company doesn’t use confidential information that companies share with it to build competing products"

The above statement may be "true" if you redefine what is confidential. The Amazon MNDA in past years basically said that they could use any information they remembered from the meeting. I read non-disclosures carefully. I've never seen anything like it.

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

#109

Post by ShroudedNight »

rckoepke wrote: post #23
former-aws wrote: post #20

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?

Given how granular AWS billing data is, I would expect the odds to be fairly good that it alone is sufficient to make a good analysis for which third-party offerings are compelling markets. Then AWS takes their execution advantage, along with things like the lower friction that arises from first-party integration with IAM and billing, as well as not having to pay retail for the cloud resources, and it becomes very difficult to retain a moat unless you have a paradigm or perspective that is both critical to succeeding and is also incompatible with AWS culture.

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

#110

Post by jariel »

Judgmentality wrote: post #18
bald wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> confidential information aka, we did not sign an NDA with the party across the table

This doesn't matter if you don't have the millions set aside to defend yourself in court against a giant conglomerate. Giant companies breaking NDAs with scrappy startups is a story I have heard often.

This generally is not the case.

If you blatantly ignore and NDA, and then make a lot of money from it, then the 'small startup' will have a ton of money because the prize is huge, i.e. a % cut to lawyers who can work pro-bono.

Imagine you have a $10B company and some bonehead PM steals info from some small startup, for some stupid small project - it puts everything at risk.

In most case, I think you have boneheaded actors, usually not acting in the best interest of the company.

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