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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

#271
Isn't this what Google did with Yelp? IIRC, google was in talks with yelp to buy them out. They either pulled out or lowballed them. Then a few months later they launched "Google Places"

At the time, this was referred to as a "brainfuck" of smaller companies for their IP.

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

#272
post #236
post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A single comment from a throwaway account with no evidence but confirms my personal bias that Amazon is evil? I'm fully bought in before I catch myself. The economic and reputation cost Amazon would take in ever accessing customer data to come up with some competing B-list product (say ElasticSearch as a managed service) is astronomical compared to potential profits. One thing I know about that company... they care a…

Whenever anyone asks for evidence I start to wonder why they need the proof. Why did you need this link? Do you have a business relationship with Amazon? https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.wsj.com/amp/articles/amazon...

[flagged]

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

#273

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "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…

I'm not talking about not having any access in the technical sense. I'm talking about a "Chinese wall" whereby people who work for AWS supporting customers should absolutely not be able to inform any of the teams that build new Amazon services. These types of Chinese walls exist in many different industries, perhaps most famously finance, and when these walls have been "breached" in the past it has resulted in huge s…

I think your understanding is true, unless the claimant elaborate what those data is and how his team got it, I do not understand how it would have worked.

Access records for public services have a very detailed iam audit trail that logs people who accessed what at what time, and service teams don't get to just jump around that. Maybe they can see some metadata but certainly not actual data in an S3 bucket somewhere.

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

#274

"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…

A clarification: I'm talking about tactics from 2010-2014. I left in 2015.

What I did not find from your post is in what manner are the data accessed. Is it at all publicly available? Is it metadata e.g. usage/billing? or is it production content like S3/lambda code/EC2 storage? It would be very helpful if you can clarify what kind of access it is.

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

#276

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…

> SOMEONE

That's not necessary unless SOMEONE includes computer programs.

Yes, when things go very seriously wrong, I believe AWS can have literal people override that permission, which will leave a mile long audit trail and likely accompanied by an internet scale outage.

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

#278

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…

for its faults aws takes data privacy super serious. if you are in support you cant even see attachments customers put on cases without providing auditable justification

and you def cant see in s3 buckets or instances. hell if a customer sends you a link to an object in their s3 youre not supposed to open it

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

#279
post #236
post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A single comment from a throwaway account with no evidence but confirms my personal bias that Amazon is evil? I'm fully bought in before I catch myself. The economic and reputation cost Amazon would take in ever accessing customer data to come up with some competing B-list product (say ElasticSearch as a managed service) is astronomical compared to potential profits. One thing I know about that company... they care a…

Whenever anyone asks for evidence I start to wonder why they need the proof. Why did you need this link? Do you have a business relationship with Amazon? https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.wsj.com/amp/articles/amazon...

> Whenever anyone asks for evidence I start to wonder why they need the proof. Why did you need this link? Do you have a business relationship with Amazon?

I had made an oath to myself to not return to Hacker News and engage with the community after I was once temporally banned on Hacker News. But when I saw your stupid comment and recognized its disingenuous manipulation and misinformation, a pushing of an evil and harmful narrative ultimately made for whatever reason you might have, I returned to Hacker News to downvote your comment. Thanks for creating a vulnerability in the world for me to exploit the loophole in my self-imposed oath that allows me to return. I'm back.

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

#280
post #172
post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Amazon does it also with popular independent sellers. I know a motorcycle shop that was selling top quality products. Amazon representative contacted him if he would like to sell on Amazon, showed him offers how to stock and sell items. Amazon started a brand with the same name and their products were higher in search, were poor quality China made, jackets that were falling apart within a year. For the same price! An…

This reminded me of the time Amazon started selling diapers at a loss to price-battle diapers.com. They won and ended up buying the parent company. https://www.vox.com/2017/3/29/15112314/amazon-shutting-down-...

This is so wildly anti-competitive. I cant believe how many stories there are like this in this thread alone.
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