Amazon scooped up data from its own sellers to launch competing products • Hacker News Board

Re: Amazon scooped up data from its own sellers to launch competing products

#501

Post by akoncius » Thu, Apr 23, 2020, 9:53 PM UTC

darkerside wrote: post #424

nwallin wrote: post #408

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If a bank were to seize your money, you'd notice, because you wouldn't have that money anymore. And it would be very well documented, leaving a clear paper trail to a criminal conviction and a civil suit. If your bodyguard did you physical harm, you'd notice, because your knees would hurt. And there would be ample evidence for a criminal case. If amazon copied all your proprietary data, you would almost certainly nev…

You're right that they are different, but maybe not as different as you think they are. > If amazon copied all your proprietary data, you would almost certainly never notice, no criminal law would apply, and you'd have a hell of a time proving it in a civil suit. If Amazon were doing this and profiting from it, that would essentially be a criminal conspiracy that reaches to the leadership of the company. Is it possib…

as sibling comment author mentioned, look at dieselgate. it was huge conspiracy against emissikns regulations and they did it relatively well for multiple years. and it’s not like it’s simple hack in software. this solution required manufacturing additional special purpoce devices, adjusting assembly line, engineering and so on. definitely it must have some design stages, testing, actual implementaion done.

main thing here is that in big corps you can divide big (evil) task into smaller steps which could be defined as non-evil in isolation, and nobody in actual implementation people crowd would understand big picture.

Re: Amazon scooped up data from its own sellers to launch competing products

#502

Post by dathinab » Thu, Apr 23, 2020, 9:54 PM UTC

taurath wrote: post #448

Tostino wrote: post #446

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's almost like there should probably be some oversight on one of the most powerful entities on the planet to stop these anti-competitive practices.

And now they can threaten what, the losses of 400k jobs if forced to not utilize their nation-state scale to screw competitors?

Actually that thread doesn't work at all. Because restricting them might cost Amazone jobs BUT:

1. Not all of them, probably a negligible amount. (Just the ones responsible for crating/producing copied products, not any ones involved in any other area)

2. Create new jobs through fair competition in similar amounts as jobs lost, likely even more as more companies being involved means more operational positions like e.g. for book keeping.

3. (2. reformulated). Not restricting it will cost as much or more jobs due to small companies going out of business and amazon as a giant company can better optimize overhead of operation away compared to many small independent businesses.

Re: Amazon scooped up data from its own sellers to launch competing products

#503

Post by mulmen » Thu, Apr 23, 2020, 9:55 PM UTC

magnetic wrote: post #451

mulmen wrote: post #403

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Banks definitely seize your money. When I was a young teenager my parents encouraged me to put my lawn mowing money in a bank account. I had a total of $100.00! We went over to Bank of America and I opened up an account and deposited my hard earned cash. A month or two later I tried to withdraw some cash and was told I had no money. My full $100.00 had been consumed by insufficient balance fees. A valuable if painful…

> A month or two later I tried to withdraw some cash and was told I had no money. My full $100.00 had been consumed by insufficient balance fees. Is that an exaggeration? It amounts to $100 or $50 a month in "low balance fee"! All the banks I've looked at had a fee under $10.

I think it may have been more than a couple of months, IIRC the fee was $20.00. This was a very long time ago.

Re: Amazon scooped up data from its own sellers to launch competing products

#504

Post by AmericanChopper » Thu, Apr 23, 2020, 9:55 PM UTC

1_person wrote: post #494

AmericanChopper wrote: post #438

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m a big believer in use cases that fit on-prem solutions like that. But you’re dreaming if you think a 6-10 box operation is going to come close to the same service levels as AWS, and if you want to replicate the developer experiences that you can achieve on AWS, you’re going to have to devote a lot of resource to it. Whether scaling works well on-prem depends entirely on your scaling requirements. If you have burs…

The CDN will be fronting most of the load, behind that 10 decently specced servers running sanely architected code can scale to millions, if not tens of millions of requests per second. Drop the servers in HA sets of 2-3 nodes across 3-4 regions, anycast your service endpoint from each cluster. The hardest thing to replicate without AWS is the 6-7 figure bills.

What you’re describing is “good enough service levels for what I need” not “the same level of service as AWS” (or a superior level, as the parent comment implied).

If some sanely architected code was all you needed, then you’d expect at least other cloud/IaaS providers to be able to match AWS service levels. Which they can’t, and which some little software shop most certainly cannot either.

Re: Amazon scooped up data from its own sellers to launch competing products

#505

Post by davesque » Thu, Apr 23, 2020, 9:56 PM UTC

This has been happening for years. I personally remember hearing people complain about it as far back as 2010 or 2011.

Re: Amazon scooped up data from its own sellers to launch competing products

#506

Post by all_blue_chucks » Thu, Apr 23, 2020, 9:56 PM UTC

1_person wrote: post #494

AmericanChopper wrote: post #438

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m a big believer in use cases that fit on-prem solutions like that. But you’re dreaming if you think a 6-10 box operation is going to come close to the same service levels as AWS, and if you want to replicate the developer experiences that you can achieve on AWS, you’re going to have to devote a lot of resource to it. Whether scaling works well on-prem depends entirely on your scaling requirements. If you have burs…

The CDN will be fronting most of the load, behind that 10 decently specced servers running sanely architected code can scale to millions, if not tens of millions of requests per second. Drop the servers in HA sets of 2-3 nodes across 3-4 regions, anycast your service endpoint from each cluster. The hardest thing to replicate without AWS is the 6-7 figure bills.

So what do you do when you are featured on CNN or whatever and you need to scale up massively in a matter of minutes? Do you just let all those sales go?

Re: Amazon scooped up data from its own sellers to launch competing products

#507

Post by riazrizvi » Thu, Apr 23, 2020, 9:58 PM UTC

johnnyballgame wrote: post #493

riazrizvi wrote: post #489

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not sure I understand. Are you saying you are the author of a new book, you haven't sold any copies yet, you created a listing for your book and people are offering to sell it as a collectible (presumably as an arbitrage where they'd fulfill on your book)? Or did you create a new listing for someone else's book, that others might credibly own already?

Author of a brand new book no one has any copies of yet.

Hmmm, why not jack up the price of yours and immediately buy one from the scammer, just as an experiment?

Re: Amazon scooped up data from its own sellers to launch competing products

#508

Post by dathinab » Thu, Apr 23, 2020, 9:58 PM UTC

theturtletalks wrote: post #458

viahoptop wrote: post #449

What is the difference between this and the store brands at supermarkets?

This is different that Costco selling their own brand vodka or toilet paper because buyers can see those items side by side when shopping. Amazon has their products on the top every time and if 3rd party sellers want to be next to them, they have to pay for ads. Amazon doesn't pay for its own ads so they can effectively hide their competition.

I believe amazone should pay for their own advertisement to well themsell and prices should be transparent (amazone has to pay them self what other would have to pay), _because then they would still need to pay tax_ for this. At least in countries where taxes are not very low this could make the situation slightly better. Through not that much better tbh.

Re: Amazon scooped up data from its own sellers to launch competing products

#509

Post by heyoni » Thu, Apr 23, 2020, 9:58 PM UTC

theturtletalks wrote: post #458

viahoptop wrote: post #449

What is the difference between this and the store brands at supermarkets?

This is different that Costco selling their own brand vodka or toilet paper because buyers can see those items side by side when shopping. Amazon has their products on the top every time and if 3rd party sellers want to be next to them, they have to pay for ads. Amazon doesn't pay for its own ads so they can effectively hide their competition.

You think store brands are sitting side by side with name brands? If anything they’re at eye level. And with amazon, they can’t actually delete the listing, but maybe you have to scroll down a bit.

Re: Amazon scooped up data from its own sellers to launch competing products

#510

Post by dathinab » Thu, Apr 23, 2020, 10:01 PM UTC

motoboi wrote: post #276

nateburke wrote: post #266

About 10 years ago I met the head of IT for B&H cameras in NYC. Among many things, he was in charge of the hosting for their online store. After he complained about dealing with physical servers, I asked him if he had ever considered using AWS ec2 for the website, and he replied that his boss refused because he believed that Amazon would pull data on B&H products and use it to compete more effectively. I'm not sure t…

There is absolutely no veil between the hypervisor and the guest virtual machines. Not in the EBS either. If they say they won't read your data, better trust them. If you don't, stay away from their datacenters. EDIT: fix typo.

Which is why a company operating cloud computing should just do that and nothing else. (And a company producing phones should also just do that and not start competing on the app marked. etc.)