Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Amazon Web Services revenue rises 81% year over year

blogs.wsj.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

111–120 of 150 posts

Re: Amazon Web Services revenue rises 81% year over year

#111

Post by jnky »

sudhirj wrote: post #106
cft wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bezos long ago figured out that the best tax strategy in modern America for a public company is to operate without profit. The company operates with a relatively (to the revenue) small loss, maintaining positive cash flow by issuing and selling additional stock. Selling new stock is (remarkably) tax free. The dilution is negligible since the stock is valued by the revenue (not profit so much). Everybody benefits: exe…

Isn't this pretty much the best strategy anywhere in the world? Is there any country that taxes by revenue? Apple has this weird problem of being so profitable that they have no clue what to do with all that money. And then everyone picks on them for their loophole-based tax mitigation strategies.

Maybe taxes on profits were created so that companies invest their profit instead of hoarding it or giving it to shareholders, creating jobs and infrastructure in the process. As far as I'm concerned, Amazon is using its profits (or lack thereof) exactly as intended.

Re: Amazon Web Services revenue rises 81% year over year

#112

Post by calpaterson »

jnky wrote: post #111
sudhirj wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't this pretty much the best strategy anywhere in the world? Is there any country that taxes by revenue? Apple has this weird problem of being so profitable that they have no clue what to do with all that money. And then everyone picks on them for their loophole-based tax mitigation strategies.

Maybe taxes on profits were created so that companies invest their profit instead of hoarding it or giving it to shareholders, creating jobs and infrastructure in the process. As far as I'm concerned, Amazon is using its profits (or lack thereof) exactly as intended.

If you returned it to shareholders they would be reinvesting it too (just somewhere else). You can return capital to investors tax efficiently using share buybacks. Haven't looked at Amazon's annual report in detail so can't tell if they are reinvesting profit in areas that will have high return or not.

Re: Amazon Web Services revenue rises 81% year over year

#113

Post by calpaterson »

sudhirj wrote: post #106
cft wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bezos long ago figured out that the best tax strategy in modern America for a public company is to operate without profit. The company operates with a relatively (to the revenue) small loss, maintaining positive cash flow by issuing and selling additional stock. Selling new stock is (remarkably) tax free. The dilution is negligible since the stock is valued by the revenue (not profit so much). Everybody benefits: exe…

Isn't this pretty much the best strategy anywhere in the world? Is there any country that taxes by revenue? Apple has this weird problem of being so profitable that they have no clue what to do with all that money. And then everyone picks on them for their loophole-based tax mitigation strategies.

Many companies have that problem. They return the capital to investors to invest somewhere else. That is how equity is supposed to work: you give someone money for something and then eventually give you back more than you gave them originally.

Re: Amazon Web Services revenue rises 81% year over year

#114

Post by blowski »

vidarh wrote: post #110
bbrazil wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> it's not a panacea because it tends to get very expensive, very quickly. I've investigated colocs near some AWS locations and found AWS to be around 20% cheaper than the cheapest viable option. With AWS's occasional price drops on top of that and general flexibility it's not a difficult choice. One thing I found was that most providers were trying to sell vertical reliability (e.g. hardware RAID1), with a matching…

The bare-metal stuff I manage typically end up at 1/3 to 1/2 of AWS costs. Yes, fully loaded costs including salaries and office costs for anyone touching the servers. You can certainly find more expensive options than AWS if you look, but similarly paying less than for AWS is easy too unless you start relying on specific AWS features.

Though, as always, your mileage may vary. Those costs have an awful lot of variables.

Re: Amazon Web Services revenue rises 81% year over year

#115

Post by _pmf_ »

boulos wrote: post #76
ChuckMcM wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You have to realize they have been consistently cutting prices (and pulling Google and somewhat Azure) along with them.

I think you misinterpret the causality of recent cloud price drops: Google's price drops at year pushed AWS to follow suit, and they haven't matched since (the gap is greater than 20% for GCE vs EC2 now). Microsoft is also publicly committed to matching AWS. Huge Disclaimer: I work at Google on GCE.

Well, given that Google's support consists of an automatic E-mail reply bot, I wonder why the gap is only 20%.

Re: Amazon Web Services revenue rises 81% year over year

#116

Post by tajen »

jnky wrote: post #111
sudhirj wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't this pretty much the best strategy anywhere in the world? Is there any country that taxes by revenue? Apple has this weird problem of being so profitable that they have no clue what to do with all that money. And then everyone picks on them for their loophole-based tax mitigation strategies.

Maybe taxes on profits were created so that companies invest their profit instead of hoarding it or giving it to shareholders, creating jobs and infrastructure in the process. As far as I'm concerned, Amazon is using its profits (or lack thereof) exactly as intended.

I don't think someone has designed taxes around incentives. In most countries wages are more heavily taxed than products, which balances the spending towards buying more things rather than employing more people. It seems very stretched, but some ecologists suggest to tax petrol more heavily and tax wages less, so it would be easier to employ more people for a task than throw more petrol at it (I use petrol in terms of fast tranports).

Re: Amazon Web Services revenue rises 81% year over year

#117

Post by eronhp »

bmir-alum-007 wrote: post #98
bbrazil wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Rented gear in someone else's racks, and it's only that cheap due to Supermicro. I did calculate what the providers premium was, and it didn't seem too unreasonable given the services such as remote hands and taking care of replacements that were being provided.

Perhaps in your use-case it was cheaper / less risk to rent than to own, but for sizable concerns, it's a no brainer that owning is far, far cheaper. (For smaller stuff/side projects: In the UK, ByteMark.co.uk is awesome, flexible (colo/rent) and cheap. In the US, Pair.com is great. Linode is also decent.) (For bigger stuff, there are datacenters in the middle of nowhere where power is cheap. That's the often limitin…

I am brazilian and I am assuming OP is too, Amazon prices in Brazil are cheaper than the competition, simply because the local oferrings are really expensive.

Re: Amazon Web Services revenue rises 81% year over year

#120

Post by skwirl »

syllogism wrote: post #36
afarrell wrote: post #9

I wonder how much of that is people forgetting to shut down unused EC2 instances

It really feels like they design the thing to make that happen. I got stung for over $100 just as a casual user, because I never guessed that I had to click through all the (slow loading) regions to see the instances and volumes and snapshots I might have burning money. The web interface is a total clusterfuck.

What I do is set up billing alerts through CloudWatch. I have $25/month in personal AWS usage paid for by my company (to encourage people to learn) and I set an alert when my monthly usage has hit $20 (which just went off yesterday).

The billing and cost management page should show you which regions you are incurring costs from on an ongoing basis.

But yeah, you have to know about all of this to use it. They should probably set a default alert at about $25/month on every new account, then let you change or delete it if you want.

Post reply on HN