Amazon met with startups about investing, then launched competing products

Post by schwartzworld » Sat, Jul 25, 2020, 2:34 PM UTC

matthewmcg wrote: post #209

throwaway-cdo wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Throwaway to avoid being ID'd. I was on the team that was peripherally involved in building the Amazon Dash collection of products. The scale idea has been floating around within the company since 2015/2016. It takes long to do this at scale and a cost-effective point. There were also other similar products that were scrapped because there was no way we could sell them at a reasonable price.

Try saying this one three times fast: Smart Sally in Sales scales sales from a smart scale.

Post by jbay808 » Sat, Jul 25, 2020, 6:30 PM UTC

jacques_chester wrote: post #299

jburgess777 wrote: post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What I was told is that if you research the patent and aware of its existence then you may be guilty of willful enfringement with treble the normal penalties: https://www.jonesday.com/en/insights/2016/06/supreme-court-u... https://www.ip-watch.org/2016/07/26/us-high-court-restores-t...

More precisely, a standing policy that researching patents is forbidden is prima facie evidence that your employees couldn't have possibly known about an existing patent. That means that a plaintiff suing for willful infringement will need to find evidence that someone went out of their way to ignore the policy. That might be quite difficult. (Of course: not a lawyer, this is not legal advice)

Post by jacques_chester » Sun, Jul 26, 2020, 12:38 AM UTC

jbay808 wrote: post #374

jacques_chester wrote: post #299

Earlier quoted context omitted.

More precisely, a standing policy that researching patents is forbidden is prima facie evidence that your employees couldn't have possibly known about an existing patent. That means that a plaintiff suing for willful infringement will need to find evidence that someone went out of their way to ignore the policy. That might be quite difficult. (Of course: not a lawyer, this is not legal advice)

Wow, I'm amazed that this would hold up. That's like saying that if I drive with a blindfold on, I couldn't possibly have willfully caused an accident because, as a matter of policy, I couldn't have been aware of the other cars on the road.

Post by swiftcoder » Sun, Jul 26, 2020, 8:14 PM UTC

mcqueenjordan wrote: post #339

swiftcoder wrote: post #303

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> everything you do as an Amazon employee basically leaves a trail with your employee ID That might be true in retail, but it wasn't anywhere close to true in AWS. When I left most engineers still had SSH access to the production hosts (and a not-insignificant portion of operations relied on that fact).

Leaving aside the question of what SSH access looks like today versus whenever you left... There are many easy mechanisms to audit and monitor SSH sessions. So... no?

Post by caralombardo » Mon, Jul 27, 2020, 4:27 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.