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

Lidl to Launch Rival to AWS

chargedretail.co.uk

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

281–290 of 516 posts

Re: Lidl to Launch Rival to AWS

#281

Post by ginko »

vidarh wrote: post #212
occamrazor wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess you mean the 2nd person form (du or ihr fir singular or plural) instead of the 3rd person plural (Sie), which is the courtesy form fir singular and plural. Yes, in German it’s a big deal, roughly the same as saying “Hey dude” instead of “Good morning Mr Smith”.

> Yes, in German it’s a big deal, roughly the same as saying “Hey dude” instead of “Good morning Mr Smith”. It's been changing for decades across a lot of languages. I grew up in Norway where these forms were dying out as I was a child (70's/80's) and mostly used to older people, to the point where they're now mostly used sarcastically to imply someone is a pompous ass or to very old people or in very formal situatio…

Austrian living in Norway here. The Sie/du thing has gotten less strict, but there's still a lot of social situations where starting out with a du would be quite awkward. It's usually fine among colleagues (esp. in university and modern IT companies), but wherever there's a more stratified hierarchy(pretty much all service sector interactions for instance) it's always a good idea to stick with Sie.

Re: Lidl to Launch Rival to AWS

#282

Post by jillesvangurp »

I work in Germany currently. Big German companies have a lot of bad reflexes in common when it comes to doing big IT projects and it's a reason for a lot of companies failing repeatedly in this space because they have the wrong focus and assumptions.

One of those reflexes basically boils down to combination of ineptness and not invented here (i.e. in Germany) syndrome. Another part of this is that the locals have an understandable historical aversion against anything invading privacy; as this has been abused by both nazi's and communists to hurt people in the past.

Unfortunately the net result is an industry that is still dependent on shoveling around a lot of paper via post and fax (!!), and a misguided trust in the security of what is basically a patch work of small companies, corporate departments, and government agencies working with very outdated, home grown stuff that can only be assumed at this point to be quite insecure and hopelessly compromised by foreign and domestic intelligence agencies at so many levels that you might as well print the stuff in a newspaper.

Most customers you talk to almost right away start assuming they can't use AWS, Google cloud, or Azure for legal reasons. Of course, all of these run data centers in Germany where they comply with applicable law to keep their quite many German customers across basically all industries happy. This is a complete non issue from a technical and legal point of view. Also, the likes of IBM, SAP, and Oracle are happy to take your money for running this for you (at great expense).

Yet, I've had this discussion with several naive startup founders where they are going to build X and of course from day 1 are going to do their own infrastructure as well because it's obviously the right thing to do (for them). Most of these startups die young. Most bigger German companies get burned repeatedly by this stuff as well.

I know at least one billion dollar construction materials company insisting on running their own cloud that are sinking obscene amounts of cash into running things in a convoluted way. There's no shortage of local suppliers preying on this type of behavior. I declined working on their pile of steaming manure.

LIDL just burned 0.5 billion with a local IT supplier (SAP) that milked them for the fools they are on a project that they should have pulled the plug on years ago. That's all you need to know about their level of competency in this area. Saying this is doomed to fail is just stating the obvious.

Re: Lidl to Launch Rival to AWS

#283

Post by asjw »

ChuckNorris89 wrote: post #158
asjw wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The other big difference is that German companies prefer stability over pure profit, because it creates a better working environment and a happier society overall, where your job doesn't depend from sheer luck, especially the lower income ones. They pulled out more Tesla's than Tesla will ever do, and they still rank on top of the carmaking industry. Tesla, on the other hand, the first thing has done when they bought…

>German companies prefer stability over pure profit Sorry, but Dieselgate would like to respectfully disagree with you.

Diesel gate has nothing to do with pure profit, it has to do with Germany keeping its market shares and the occupational figures (the stability I was talking about)

Only 2% of the cars were sold in US

Of course the fact that US was leading the production of luxury electric cars has to do with the revelation being made public in 2013 while politicians and regulators have known for years

They were (illegally) accumulating money to invest in electric car manufacturing without having to "disrupt" the industry which has political consequences in Europe, where job places are highly unionised

I'm not saying they were right I'm saying that they were keeping the stability at any cost, they just sacrificed some upper manager after the scandal, and in fact 6 years later the numbers say that in the electric car market "Volkswagen leads all carmakers with over 1.4 million sales. Renault-Nissan and China's Geely have also overtaken Tesla."

Re: Lidl to Launch Rival to AWS

#284

Post by why_only_15 »

luckylion wrote: post #143
oneplane wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I still think it's weird that companies think this helps anything. AWS isn't the same as the Amazon shop. Yes it shares the name and if you go enough levels above management you end up with Bezos but other than that their computers != their shop. Sometimes people then point to the fact that it's still a US company but ironically people try to make that point on their US-created computers using websites on a US-owned…

Amazon said (to Congress, no less) that it does not let it's own team responsible to deciding on which products to buy & sell access confidential sales reports of third party sellers that use their platform. And then it was revealed that they regularly do get access to these information. There's no reasonable expectation that Amazon will not use any data it can easily access to make decisions. I don't find that your…

>It's very hard to build e.g. CPUs that will contain very advanced backdoors that are totally hidden but can easily be targeted remotely to gather information

Wasn't IME a thing for years but people still don't have a great understanding of how it works?

Re: Lidl to Launch Rival to AWS

#285

Post by ginko »

bigiain wrote: post #239
Merem wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most definitely. Being relatively young, I don't think it's any different. In a work environment it's always "Sie", until one is offered "du". First name/family name depends on how companies/individuals handle it. Apart from that, people handle it differently. "Sie" basically always for people older than you and some use "du" for others around your age (unless it's in a more professional setting). There is no differe…

I wonder if I'm the only person stomping round the house now singing: Sie! Sie hast! Sie Hast Mich!

*Sie haben

Re: Lidl to Launch Rival to AWS

#286

Post by asjw »

jotm wrote: post #117
ChuckNorris89 wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>building fancy pilots all day, but refuse roll them out because it will cannibalize their core business That's the big difference I've noticed between German and US companies. In German companies if you are an exec that brought success to the company in the past then your word is the law and focus is on keeping the status quo and make sure that any new ventures don't make existing higher ups obsolete. Whereas in US…

They are more conservative. Blockbuster, Sears. VW, BMW.

But also Siemens, Bosch, Bayer, Lufthansa Systems

Btw, even though I'm a huge Ferrari fan, the research being made at Daimler AG (Mercedes) is astonishing, not only in Formula 1, their self driving trucks are an incredible piece of technology

Re: Lidl to Launch Rival to AWS

#288

Post by LargoLasskhyfv »

neuronic wrote: post #205
verst wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Trader Joe's in the US is owned by Aldi Nord. How come Trader Joe's is doing well here in the US despite Amazon? I don't know anything about the operations and logistics of Trader Joe's but from a consumer perspective the stores seem very streamlined. In many ways it reminds me of Lidl in Germany (more so than Aldi).

Because the person doesn't know what they are talking about. Germans will never prefer Amazon over known local stores - it's already enough to be an American company these days. People know what that means and they don't want it. Wal-Mart completely crashed and burned in Germany and it already started at the weird greeting person at the entry. When Germans see this, the business is basically already bust. Keep the fa…

Lidl in .de forced that fake customer relation smile onto us too, and it didn't crash and burn for it. My (late) mother liked Walmart for it's watercooler. I have been only one time into a german one, because too impractical location for me, and when i wanted to check it out again (because soooo laaaarge) it was closed down.

That bagging thing... don't know what to make of it, since we don't have it, but let me tell you that this can go the other way too. IMO the ones giving evil stares or making haste otherwise are the morons. Driven slaves under stress. I intentionally slow down and give space when some older or otherwise challenged person takes her time. To the extent of getting a real smile from the cashiers.

Re: Lidl to Launch Rival to AWS

#289

Post by _the_inflator »

paganel wrote: post #134
benjohnson1707 wrote: post #96

Former Schwarz employee here: The company made SO much money in the past 4 decades with big box / discount retailing, you won't believe it. Salaries are off the charts (it would make senior software engineers in SV look pale). Hubris is as well. The only thing that drives reasoning are statements like 'we're not just some random company, we're Schwarz Group'. It's the poster child Corp described by Andy Gorves statem…

> Salaries are off the charts Just to add another data point, Lidl is also the retailer that pays the best market salaries in the Eastern-European country where I live in (they actually included that in several of their hiring ads), and I'm talking about shop people like cashiers and the people that put things on the shelves. > They are getting into the car sales and recycle business as well. In here they've also ope…

German in Management here.

This "Du/Sie" thing is a local shit test in Germany in my opinion. Comparable to what I experienced in strictly hierarchical enterprises like Sony US in the early 2010th, where at least one Senior Manager would only talk to an employee directly, instead only to her senior manager (same level BS).

Informal is owning the workforce finally, it is on the rise, and you can use it as a shit detector. People who value hierarchy over merits will refer to these manners. Others not. :)

Post reply on HN