Target is plotting a big move away from AWS as Amazon takes over retail
cnbc.com
cnbc.com
Amazon/AWS is not going to fail because Target took away their business. But Target could easily screw up transitioning to another provider, and end up paying a lot in terms of money and wasted effort. Money and effort that would have been better spent improving their core business. Target should concentrate on build a better retail business than Amazon, not worrying about whether that business is built on top of AWS or some other cloud provider.
It's like how Apple compete with Samsung in the smartphone market, but still relies on Samsung as a central component supplier for many of their devices. I'm sure Apple execs would prefer not to give Samsung any money, but they're also smart enough to realise that using only non-Samsung suppliers simply for the sake of it would ultimately be a self-defeating move.
Which is why AWS would never do this in the first place.
https://www.geekwire.com/2011/target-finally-parts-ways-amaz...
If one has data on pricing and sales across retail and online channels on a national scale, how risky would a purchase of a retailer really be? Not much, as you can pivot towards high sales, high profit products without doubting your strategy
Target, Walmart & other retailers de-risked Amazon's purchase of wholefoods
Nonetheless with Amazon Marketplace they already habe a platform where they know every transaction, price and product from third parties.
I can't imagine any manager or engineer willing to risk their career doing so.
Then again, a director at Volkswagen agreed to intentionally cheat emissions tests, so perhaps an Amazon employee would be foolish enough to snoop on Target's data.
Absolutely correct. Mutually assured destruction[1].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mutual_assured_destruction
On the downside, they could lose their most profitable business unit.
Check out all the audits they go through. If you're an enterprise customer with this concern you can get access to those audit reports and see if it's one of the things being looked at by an independent third party.
Besides, all Target has to do is encrypt the data. Boom, non-factor.
I am not saying that the Amazon board will authorize a change in strategy to dig into every customer data. But if I believed that companies internal audit were enough to prevent fraud, there would be no need for a banking regulator for instance.
It doesn't have to be a careful CEO decision. It could just be a curious engineer and someone in strategy who appreciates the data. That's probably how it started at VW, not with the board deciding that this is a wise strategy.
I think it's totally healthy to maintain paranoia about AWS if you are competing against them.
Multiple times I was trying to troubleshoot an issue and asked them to "just log into the database" and they said they have very strict policies against that.
There is no way they have any of Target's data.
Doesn't Reddit have a policy against secretly editing user's posts? Didn't precisely that happen during the election by an admin?
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2016/nov/25/reddit-ceo-a...
Microsoft issued a statement in justification saying that it didn't need a warrant since they consider that the data stored on their services is their, and no warrant is required to search oneself.
Microsoft can not get a warrant in any case: they are not a law enforcement agency.
They quite aggressively mined this for data that was used competitively for Amazon's own online retail operations. I'm not surprised that this combined with Amazon making a big move into brick and mortar retail would worry existing retailer, especially Target, who along with Borders was, IIRC, one of the noteworthy retailers that had been dependent on Amazon's earlier service.
I remember when the new Target website launched, and they had a 'Credits' page on the website (or a press release?) that listed over 50 partners that made the launch possible, kinda crazy and not surprising that the website failed on launch day.
Additionally, Target partnered with a popular designer to launch their product line on the same day to celebrate the new website, adding insult to injury with a huge traffic spike.
Their inexperience in operating a retail website was painfully obvious. For example, the search results were accurate when really you want to optimize for the customer experience and not accuracy - the first couple pages of search results for an item were all the right items but also all out of stock, so it looked like a very empty store as you clicked through page after page of unavailable items. The search results should have sorted in-stock items to the top by default.
And I don't mean that necessarily negatively: they see Bezos as a visionary in a market he's helping to define.
If they are paying more to another provider, they are making themselves less competitive in contrast to Amazon, although maybe Microsoft lured them with a discount on Azure.
OTOH the cost of moving cloud providers, if significant, is going to be an additional operational expense that would make them less competitive.
It's like Apple buying chips from Samsung.
Why would you put your valuable data on servers being hosted by a competitor?
It's not like they don't have any other options either.