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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

#341

Post by mcqueenjordan »

paulgb wrote: post #57
former-googler wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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".

Xoogler and current AWS and both companies have a "do not open or read patents" policy.

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

#342

Post by namdnay »

wolco wrote: post #236
ctvo wrote: 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...

That's talking about Amazon Retail, not AWS

The customer data on Amazon Retail is Amazon's, not the seller's , just like the customer data when you buy shampoo from Walmart is Walmart's, not Procter&Gamble's

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

#343

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

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

#344

Post by ikiris »

kerng wrote: post #179
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.

This is incorrect, at least from a logical POV and why it's hard to trust what cloud vendors say. A statement like this is either naive (most likely) or actively attempting to mislead. Technically, its absolutely possible. Most likely you'll just need a support ticket or bug, and then you can troll around as engineer. Also, security teams also usually have access to stuff when things get interesting. Better to say th…

This really isn't how modern security works at most cloud companies. Even if you have root class credentials or the ability to escalate to them in some way (and that's a big if by itself), its a LOT of steps to get access to customer data, almost always involving broken glass, many protection layers, and often requires cooperation of multiple other root level people/credentials from completely different teams.

Depending on how the infrastructure is built, or what the particular service set up, it may not even be possible to gain access to specific data without extraordinary means, possibly involving replacing physical hardware.

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

#347

Post by oblio »

seizethecheese wrote: post #170
relaxing wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of course they’re reading the new startup descriptions. That’s the sort of market research due diligence that’s expected of any PM. They fly in startups for presentations to get a glimpse into their inner workings, you think they aren’t taking the time to read about what everyone’s doing first?

Well, no I didn’t think they were doing that much research on startups. Do you know this from experience?

All these big companies buy startups periodically, did you think they just roll dice to choose them, before the acquisition? :-)

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

#348

Post by PovilasID »

VCs will often meet with startups to get market analysis done for them. Maybe it's not the primary motivation of a meeting but information has to be presented to make the case for the business, so it gets recorded and used anyway. It can be used to look for alternative investment targets. Pitches have inherent risks to them, that have to be taken into consideration.

Also I get that Amazon has much more resources but if they there able to copy it after one meeting... Was your project really that valuable? And would not be copied then you launched?

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

#349

Post by altgoogler »

paulgb wrote: post #57
former-googler wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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".

Another anon Googler here (with a slightly older account).

Your experience matches mine. I think it might even be somewhere in the mandatory periodic training.

Doing a patent search as a software engineer can only hurt you. Better just to route any questions to product counsel.

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

#350

Post by stepstop »

DetroitThrow wrote: post #268
pyrrh0tech wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hey it's me pyrrhotech, and upon some additional reflection decided that I was wrong and maybe there are some issues with copycats. Just wasn't thinking straight before.

Ahaha. @dang, this is the issue with allowing unverified throwaways. Speaking of that, I'd be happy to verify my location if you'd be interested!

The fake’s username shows up in green is a sufficient flag. What more do you want? I like the unverified functionality
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