Amazon met with startups about investing, then launched competing products

Post by jburgess777 » Thu, Jul 23, 2020, 11:21 PM UTC

luizfelberti wrote: post #230

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'm sorry but what you just said is patently false: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-07-29/capital-o... Quote: Capital One Financial Corp. said data from about 100 million people in the U.S. was illegally accessed after prosecutors accused a Seattle woman identified by Amazon.com Inc. as one of its former cloud service employees of breaking into the bank’s server. While the complaint doesn’t identify the…

Post by anonymousDan » Thu, Jul 23, 2020, 11:26 PM UTC

TimSchumann wrote: post #60

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #29

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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.

> "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. It’s remarkable to me how many competent programmers with years or decades experience in this industry don’t understand —- If you’re using AWS, Amazon has access to ALL of the data you put on AWS. Not that they 'can' or 'want to', given the current state…

Post by twic » Thu, Jul 23, 2020, 11:32 PM UTC

guessbest wrote: post #184

AndrewKemendo wrote: post #137

There's no way to really know how true this is but it certainly feels true if you're on the startup side - however most startups just aren't being realistic with themselves, and thinking they are special. For example, my previous company brought our 6DOF MonoSLAM SDK, 3D model processor and OpenGL viewer to Amazon from 2014-2017 pitching the "AR View" functionality that they eventually put in 2017 [1]. Was that a res…

Why even pitch the idea to big companies then? Seems like a no brainer to just avoid discussing technology with anyone on the M&A team of any large company with an development team, unless you went to the same college as their executive staff.

Post by jbay808 » Thu, Jul 23, 2020, 11:36 PM UTC

abfan1127 wrote: post #226

paulgb wrote: post #57

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Lots of anon accounts (reasonably) in this thread, so I want to back up as a non-anon former Googler that your experience matches mine. It wasn't "ignore patents", it was "don't look up patents so you aren't influenced by them".

I worked at Medtronic and currently work at Qualcomm. Both companies had policies matching this. Don't search patents so you are not influenced by them.

Post by dataminded » Thu, Jul 23, 2020, 11:44 PM UTC

jessaustin wrote: post #129

rattray wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Neither "traction of products hosted on its platform" nor "customer list of those hosted products" are typically public information. They are information to which a trusted vendor might have access. There seems to be a fine line between trusting Amazon to sell and ship one's products and services without using its position to sell competing products and services, and trusting AWS to host one's confidential data witho…