Target is moving away from AWS after Amazon bought Whole Foods | Hacker News Reader

Target is moving away from AWS after Amazon bought Whole Foods

cnbc.com

14 pointscoloneltcb8 comments

It makes you wonder if Amazon would be well served to create more of a "Chinese Wall" between the retail operations and AWS. I think there is already some degree of separation, but I think the public zeitgeist still includes the idea that they are tightly intertwined.

It seems to me that trust is a huge element of cloud computing ("There is no cloud, just somebody else's computer") and AWS would be easier to trust if there was no reason to think they would ever try to harm a customer just because they compete with Amazon's retail arm.

I don't believe a Chinese Wall would work; the problem is Amazon is subsidizing its retail operations with AWS. If you use AWS and you're in the retail or grocery space, you're shoveling cash at your competitor. Time to go to Google, Azure, OpenStack on your own bare metal, etc.

Walmart is doing it too: https://www.google.com/search?q=walmart+aws

Seems like it'd be profitable/good business to target retail businesses for cloud services as long as you agree to not compete with their retail operations.

If that's their only reasoning, it's not good business

If moving to on-prem, GCP, etc for solid business and technical reasons, then that's one thing

It makes prefect sense. Why help your competitor by being a customer?

I don't think this move was caused my Amazon buying Whole Foods. It's not like Whole Foods and Target are really in competition at all.

Seems like this was long time coming. I'm sure Amazon's been cannibalizing Target's business in the electronics/books department already. Come to think of it, the only thing I really go to Target for is clothes (I like some of their brands) and Amazon's starting to invade that sector too with Amazon Fashion.

I don't understand why Netflix still uses them?

Perhaps because Netflix figured out that if there's even a whiff of impropriety on the part of Amazon, and it gets out, Amazon will lose a ton of other business. Because if they'll screw Netflix, they'll screw you, too, if you're seen as a competitor.

That's just a guess, of course, but it's also why I think Target could be over-reacting a bit.

Netflix is in a interesting situation. They're like whole foods right now. Someone out there with a lot of money will eventually gobble them up, the question is who, will it be amazon, apple, or some chinese company. Only time will tell. I don't think Netflix will go the way of Blockbuster because their integration into the television market is so high, on so many box appliances connected to so many televisions without reliance directly on cable television. If netflix tomorrow ran into issues with aws, they'd switch in a heart beat to IBM's SoftLayer, or Google Cloud, they're not worried, I'm sure by now their entire stack is agnostic to aws, and they're prepared to move if the event ever occurs. Just a educated guess.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com