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Amazon Cognito

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Re: Amazon Cognito

#121

Post by Iftheshoefits »

sib wrote: post #111
mindcrime wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because the best way to get a user to "move in" is to make it easy for them to "move out". It's actually in Amazon's financial interest to make it easy for people to move off of their offerings.

Joel wrote about this back in 2000. Barriers to exits become their own barriers to entry. http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000052.html

The thing about casual discussions like that is it's easy to build a narrative without actually providing much substance. Joel's essay doesn't discuss Microsoft's "barrier(s) to exit" that Office itself didn't give up completely until last year (cf: Open Document), and Windows itself has yet to yield (it is still the dominant OS, by far, in the desktop and laptop markets).

Sure, "barriers to exit become barriers to entry" is applicable in some contexts, and for some part of a potential market it will be the barrier that keeps those customers away. I wouldn't dispute that. I would dispute that "barriers to exit become barriers to entry" be treated as a universal maxim applicable along all businesses and products. It's just as much of a strategy mistake to make as assuming the barrier can't exist in the first place. It ought to be considered; not treated as a key issue until or unless the data suggest it should be.

Re: Amazon Cognito

#123

Post by newobj »

nostromo wrote: post #98

Amazon seems to be in "me too" mode lately. They released an Android phone, a Dropbox clone, and now a Parse clone. Instead being the vanguard of innovation, they're letting other companies validate the need for a service before swooping in. Who's next? Probably Stripe.

Amazon Payments launched in 2007, and Stripe lunched publicly in 20011.

Re: Amazon Cognito

#124

Post by donavanm »

SimianLogic2 wrote: post #74

seems kind of expensive for what it does. imagine a game with 100k DAU (big, but not huge) 2 sessions per user per day say 10 "saves" per session 100,000 * 2 * 10 = 2 million synchs / 10k * $0.15 = $30/day for $900/month you could do FAR better just rolling your own these numbers are all reasonable for a mobile game... so it seems to me that the main use pattern would be for apps that don't need to synch very often.…

Or lets say thats about $12,000 a year. Very conservatively thats 1/10th of a developers cost. Could you really build, and operate, a truly equivalent service with 1/10th of a developer? Im dubious.

There are many cost/efficiency arguments against outsourcing infrastructure. I dont think this is one of them.

Re: Amazon Cognito

#125

Post by aendruk »

orandolabs wrote: post #119

The similarities between Cognito and EnduroSync (Orando Labs, https://orandolabs.com - announced in May) are striking. Including the latin sounding names. Except that EnduroSync is an object store and has no data size limitations. Even the pricing is similar. As far as Hacker New goes, we announced EnduroSync back in May, and got no promotion. Not one up vote?

My impression is that the interest here is not in the product itself, but in the insight that it lends about a known player.

Re: Amazon Cognito

#126

Post by quadrangle »

josh2600 wrote: post #75
amirmc wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, users care about this but like most things you have to segment the market appropriately. I meet more and more people who are wary of putting all their trust/data/etc into only one provider, be that Google, Apple or anyone else. It's not just a privacy thing but a growing awareness of the sheer dependency on that one company. (Aside: I have to say FB is being pretty clever by buying up apps and letting them stay…

I thought like this once. Futurists have a tendency to imagine a world of changed human behavior and it's compelling to do so. The reality is that the future rarely arrives as sweeping change, but rather as metaphor and specialization. Whereas you can imagine others adopting new patterns of behavior because you understand the underlying reasons why such behavior is reasonable, the metaphor through which you explain t…

> time and again we've shown that those are not things consumers want or are willing to pay for

CITATION please. I think we have never seen such things. We've not had studies that control for all other factors and then conclude that users don't want control and privacy. I think your claim is flat out wrong. You're taking the fact that most users won't sacrifice by using a lower-quality, obscure thing for privacy and control, and leaping to the baseless conclusion that nobody cares about these things. I think you're completely wrong.

Re: Amazon Cognito

#127

Post by curun1r »

bellerocky wrote: post #14

I don't know how Amazon comes up with names for its products, but recently they all strike me as weird and stupid names. Do they confer with marketing first? Zocalo, Cognito? Really? These are the kinds of names you invent when you're looking for a cheap domain name for your startup. For Amazon, they don't make a lot of sense. They just seem like some executive out of their marketing depth and out of touch trying to…

Zocalo, sure...but Cognito makes complete sense. The word incognito basically means anonymous. The prefix 'in-' frequently negates the meaning of the word it's attached to. So when you remove the negation from anonymous, you get a known identity, which seems very apropos to an identity service.

Re: Amazon Cognito

#128

Post by ColinCera »

bellerocky wrote: post #14

I don't know how Amazon comes up with names for its products, but recently they all strike me as weird and stupid names. Do they confer with marketing first? Zocalo, Cognito? Really? These are the kinds of names you invent when you're looking for a cheap domain name for your startup. For Amazon, they don't make a lot of sense. They just seem like some executive out of their marketing depth and out of touch trying to…

Cognito means known, recognized, identified; contrast with incognito. Is that really such a terrible, horrible, no good name for a service that verifies user identities and manages user profile data?

It's a shame Amazon can't afford to hire a marketing genius like you, but I think they're doing the best they can with the idiots they have to work with.

Re: Amazon Cognito

#129

Post by ColinCera »

nni wrote: post #113
SimianLogic2 wrote: post #74

seems kind of expensive for what it does. imagine a game with 100k DAU (big, but not huge) 2 sessions per user per day say 10 "saves" per session 100,000 * 2 * 10 = 2 million synchs / 10k * $0.15 = $30/day for $900/month you could do FAR better just rolling your own these numbers are all reasonable for a mobile game... so it seems to me that the main use pattern would be for apps that don't need to synch very often.…

interesting. Higher than their example pricing which was based on 500k sessions/month with a sync at begin and end ( https://aws.amazon.com/cognito/pricing/ ). I find the aws pricing (and "cloud pricing" in general) fairly confusing, and the things is that you have to be so careful that the wrong checkbox isn't checked or something that opens the spigot to the credit card# you had to enter to try out the service on t…

I think Amazon's pricing example is based on a fairly unrealistic use case where you only sync at the end of a session. With real world applications, most of them sync multiple times during a session, e.g., every 5 minutes, every 30 minutes, every time a significant atom of work is done (e.g., Gmail saving drafts). With mobile devices it's common to turn them off abruptly, or lose connectivity abruptly. A user's not going to enjoy the experience if nothing they did in their session on their phone is available when they fire up their laptop because the phone app only syncs at the end of a session.

Re: Amazon Cognito

#130

Post by jmathai »

walterbell wrote: post #103
jmathai wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I spent the last 3 years under this hypothesis [1][2][3]. In those 3 years I've come to realize that users don't actually care that much. Sure a subset of users care but the majority don't. I think the "personal cloud" that makes sense both architecturally and in the minds of consumers looks very different from what we as developers understand it to be. When we took our software and began prototyping it on hardware d…

Can you put it on the Seagate Wireless Drive? This has a simple value proposition: Apple charges $100 for incremental 16/32/64 GB mobile storage. Users can buy 2TB worth of wifi storage for $200 and replacement firmware+source ( http://www.hackseagatesatellite.com/ ) for $35.

Haven't tried on a Seagate device. We've put it on WD MyCloud and NetGear ReadyNAS devices. I know others have got it installed on Drobos as well.

Most of these NAS devices run some version of Linux which makes it trivial to set up our software on them. Some are easier than others though.

Beyond that I can't say much regarding what we've been tinkering with internally but it's pretty damn cool :).

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