Amazon met with startups about investing, then launched competing products

Post by daiwaka » Fri, Jul 24, 2020, 9:29 PM UTC

former-aws wrote: post #20

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…

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.

Post by kerng » Fri, Jul 24, 2020, 10:04 PM UTC

donavanm wrote: post #340

kerng wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Ideally customer is notified each time it happens - that would be cool, but likely technically not possible You're underestimating the investments that AWS (and Amazon at large) make in to security, confidentiality, and auditing. You're also missing a fundamental implication of building AWS on AWS primitives. As a relevant example there is only one AWS IAM and one CloudTrail. It's a core tenant of AWS IAM to put th…

Post by jonplackett » Fri, Jul 24, 2020, 10:08 PM UTC

curious_fella1 wrote: post #355

jonplackett wrote: post #177

Not from Amazon but this happened to me when I had an app in the top 10 of the AppStore. This a-hole from Silicon Valley flew over to London, asked me loads of stuff, saying he wanted to buy it, offering large amounts of cash and then just launched his own version and some copies of other things I’d made. I’m still not sure if it was his plan all along or not - He did try and recruit me to his company at one point bu…

> his parting words were “if someone offers you a seat on a spaceship, don’t ask which seat” Lol what a jackass

Post by count » Sat, Jul 25, 2020, 1:51 AM UTC

discodave wrote: post #323

count wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except they get audited by 3rd parties on statements like that, and have controls tested. It's not like they're just ... digital ocean or somebody.

The audits check that controls are in place, not that the controls are technically bulletproof or people-proof. Source: Worked at AWS for several years including working on systems that had audit requirements for [secret project where I could not know the name of the customer because I don't have TOP SECRET security clearance].

Post by danaris » Sat, Jul 25, 2020, 1:32 PM UTC

webo wrote: post #223

jasonjayr wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you have evidence of this claim re DO? I worked with a DO on an technical issue, and they were steadfastly against me granting them temporary access to our servers even though it would have made the issue easier to diagnose. Cloud provider that verifiably get caught doing this will quickly lose the trust of all their large customers

DO doesn't have a great track record for customer trust. I run personal workload but couldn't recommend it over AWS to a larger company. - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23117660 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20064169