Amazon Is Becoming the New Microsoft
cringely.com
cringely.com
Seems like small potatoes today, doesn't it?
When was the last time you've heard of anti trust litigation because iPhones come with Safari or a whole bunch of Apple services? What about Google and its software on any and all Android phones? And why can Amazon tie Kindle to its book store and not get sued by competitors?
We are allowing these companies to integrate vertically to the point of insanity.
And the biggest of all of them -- Google Chrome browser advertised on the Google Search FRONT page with link directly under the search box; a spot seen by billions of people that neither you nor your small business or even a corp with billions in revenue have access to!
It still blows my mind they never got in trouble for that.
Anyone used Bing lately?
All the DuckDuckGo users
I’m curious - does it suggest ways for citizens to change this?
When one takes at face value the extremely simplistic way you stated it, yes, it seems small. But that's not what happened. Microsoft was convicted of using their monopoly position in operating systems to extend their reach into web browsers. Practically speaking, the only consumer operating systems at the time ran on personal computers, either desktops or laptops, and in that market Microsoft held an overwhelming market share. There were no mass market smartphones (there was WinCE, but few I knew had them), Palm Pilots held the PDA market for a short while, but all a drop in the bucket compared to full-blown OSs.
When was the last time you've heard of anti trust litigation because iPhones come with Safari or a whole bunch of Apple services?
Go buy a turnkey Android phone if you don't like it.
What about Google and its software on any and all Android phones?
Go buy an iPhone if you don't like that.
And why can Amazon tie Kindle to its book store and not get sued by competitors?
Apple's iBooks has about everything you'll find on Amazon. Haven't used it, but I'd be surprised if Google Books wasn't close enough.
What were you going to buy computer-wise in 2001? A desktop or laptop that came with Microsoft Windows whether you wanted it or not. That was your practical choice, and the courts found that though it was fine for Microsoft to own the OS market, it was not fine to leverage that into driving Netscape out of business.
Sounds like enough of a monopoly to me.
Or use LineageOS + microG [1]
> What were you going to buy computer-wise in 2001? A desktop or laptop that came with Microsoft Windows whether you wanted it or not. That was your practical choice, and the courts found that though it was fine for Microsoft to own the OS market, it was not fine to leverage that into driving Netscape out of business.
Yep, not only that, Microsoft insisted a computer should come preinstalled with an OS (an anti-piracy argument IIRC). So eventually, some vendors included FreeDOS. Also, if you wanted to run something else like Linux on a computer it would cost you serious work. An example is "winmodem", an onboard software modem instead of a traditional dedicated 'hardware' modem. Or WiFi drivers which wouldn't work because the drivers were closed source.
The main alternative was building your own computer. That's not feasible with a laptop though.
Also I recommend people not just look at only SCO but the whole Halloween documents (and do realise even those are a summary). For example, have a peak at one of the earlier Halloween documents which described how Netscape was driven out of business.
Eh, that's like arguing that Linux was a viable alternative for the everyday consumer during the Microsoft days. While you _could_ do that in a practical sense most people don't have the know-how (as you mentioned in your reply).
Lots of people bought computers and put linux on them. You could also buy Macs. There were lots of screwdriver shops where they'd put together a machine for you with no "Windows Tax", if you wanted one.
The thing about browsers at the time - they were all free. Explorer, Netscape, Opera. It's a weird anti-trust case to complain about software being free.
I agree that it's odd to see such a case when the competitor's product is also free, though.
Opera used a pay-to-remove-the-ads model around that time, but I don't know if Netscape ever considered doing so.
Most people simply use what comes with the operating system given no other choice.
On the other hand, if there wasn't such an option, the EU would probably eventually get complaints from commercial mediaplayer vendors if the WMP gets an unfairly high marketshare and yes, in that case it should be "illegal" too.
Netscape and Opera both charged money for their browsers when they came out. The price for a license at the time of the trial is irrelevant, it's what the price was when Microsoft's alleged infractions occurred. They became free of charge later (maybe; was Navigator ever free for commercial use?), and why do you think that was?
What is never mentioned is that Netscape was woefully inferior to IE 3.
> why do you think that was?
Competition drove the price to 0. Isn't that great? Linux was free then, too. I didn't think that was dastardly, either. Nearly all the software I use today has a price of $0. I use Google, it's free. I use Wikipedia, it's free. I use Github, it's free. I use HackerNews, it's free. I use reddit, it's free.
I build compilers professionally, and give them away for free.
They have 80% of the ebook market (90% in uk) and 75% of the ereader market (apparently). In some countries much higher.
I suspect they are gaining monopoly positions in smart buttons (which currently don't matter) and audio assistants (echo).
It doesn't matter as I understand it if there are competing products when no one buys them, and here in the UK I've seen many echos, but not one Google home in the wild.
Given echo and kindle both cross sell amazon's online marketplace, that could get nasty.
Absolutely not. Look for technical ebooks and compare the results between iBooks and Kindle. iBooks only matches Kindle for popular "what's everyone reading" and "cultural zeitgeist" fiction/nonfiction books.
And this year, I bought a laptop and found out that routine BIOS updates via UEFI capsule don't work if I've installed Linux. Microsoft still has an OS monopoly to such an extent that OEMs feel fine about failing to support any situation in which you run anything but the bundled Microsoft OS, even at the hardware/firmware level.
I didn't follow the court case and I don't know if that was a central part of it, but if it wasn't it should have been.
It's easy to think, now that JavaScript has won, that ActiveX in browsers was never going to take off, but I think there was a real risk (and as I understand it in South Korea it did reach critical mass and effectively force everyone to have access to Internet Explorer for a decade and a half).
I don't think Google have done anything similar to that with Chrome.
I think the difference is Google wants other browsers to implement those APIs by providing a path to standardization.
SPDY was replaced with HTTP2.
NaCl was replaced with Web Assembly.
WebSQL was replaced with IndexedDB.
Chrome extensions kind of became Web Extensions.
Contrast CSS, where Microsoft participated in the design (while Netscape tried to push their own different thing) and signed off on the standard, but chose not to update their implementation to match what the final standard said.
With the exception of Google in the search market, None of the examples you cite are in monopoly market positions. Nobody will force Apple to allow other browsers on the iPhone, for example, because there are other mobile phones users can purchase if they require that feature.
Google (in the search market) is of course currently being examined by Europe for its possibly-anti-competitive practices. But these things take time.
every time the government actually does something like this, it is merely an instruction manual to every other massive corporation on the planet on how to technically do the same thing but more effectively.
90%+ of people used a Windows machine exclusively. By making IE the default & forcing OEMs to install it, they were using that that monopoly to crush Netscape.
Today's world is significantly more fragmented. People typically use at least two devices (a mobile device, in addition to a desktop or laptop). No single company controls the browser market the same way MS/IE did. Chrome has 54%[1], whereas IE had peaked at 95%[2].
[1] http://gs.statcounter.com/ [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers#Th...
Their attitude towards labour has been nothing short of Dickensian. I'm not speaking so much of their habit of writing dystopian employment contracts and turning to legal intimidation when employees leave, though that is also a problem, as I am of their treatment of lower paid staff. Refusing dock workers adequate rest, hydration or cooling is indefensible.
However impressive the accomplishments and intellect of Mr. Bezos may be, we can no longer hold any faith he or Amazon will bow to even minimal concerns of human decency. The only levers are the threat of financial and regulatory consequences. The further Amazon's power places them beyond such levers the more dangerous they become.
https://www.salon.com/2014/02/23/worse_than_wal_mart_amazons...
> The series revealed the lengths Amazon was prepared to go to keep costs down and output high and yielded a singular image of Amazon’s ruthlessness—ambulances stationed on hot days at the Amazon center to take employees suffering from heat stroke to the hospital. Despite the summer weather, there was no air-conditioning in the depot, and Amazon refused to let fresh air circulate by opening loading doors at either end of the depot—for fear of theft. Inside the plant there was no slackening of the pace, even as temperatures rose to more than 100 degrees.
> On June 2, 2011, a warehouse employee contacted the US Occupational Safety and Health Administration to report that the heat index had reached 102 degrees in the warehouse and that fifteen workers had collapsed. On June 10 OSHA received a message on its complaints hotline from an emergency room doctor at the Lehigh Valley Hospital: “I’d like to report an unsafe environment with an Amazon facility in Fogelsville. . . . Several patients have come in the last couple of days with heat related injuries.”
It's also worth adding that Amazon eventually did retrofit their facilities with cooling devices but only after their practices drew international media coverage.
Bear in mind people are ready to queue up to pay a ton more for Apple on the basis that they strive to produce a better product on all dimensions - they are the poster child for quality across the board being a viable business approach. That should go consistently through the products and services like a stick of rock and include things like work conditions and green manufacturing.
Then we should probably stick to discussing what's terrible about this, and how to fix it. We can "what about" Apple in a later discussion.
That link only really gets into the fact that they have a large market share. That alone does't make them a 90s era Microsoft.
Is any thing in an analogy the same as the thing it points to? No. That's the very idea behind an analogy: that it points to something being alike between two entities, not about them being/doing same exact things (which wouldn't need an analogy) or totally unlike things (for which one wouldn't make sense).
In this case, what Cringely wants you to think/see is not that Amazon "bundles it browser" or "sues Linux a la Sco", but how it's a huge monopoly, it uses its power as leverage, and it screws the little guys.
I'd start with "huge monopoly". Unlike computing in the 90s, I can buy anything I want online without doing business with Amazon.
Whether its Chinese knock-offs or online storage, Cringley fails to make the case for "huge monopoly" just like Microsoft. Microsoft got their OS monopoly via business practices that they arguably should have been (but weren't) convicted of. Amazon is taking over the world because...oh, I'll let Robert tell you in his own words:
"Part of the reason AWS is gaining market share is because Microsoft’s Azure doesn’t boot virtual machines quite as fast."
Well, those fuckers, with their crooked business dealings...wait a minute, did you just say a VM on Amazon's product boots faster than Microsoft's? Be right back...
Of course, Cringley will proceed to tell us the awful outcome of this monopoly, just like it was back in the 90s and early 2000s with Microsoft:
"Put simply, AWS is a pain to deal with if you are a customer big enough to be in personal communication and not just a credit card number. This, too, is like the old Microsoft."
So, to recap, Amazon is taking over the world because they have a better product, but the downside is that their customer service sucks. Microsoft took over the world through questionable (some argue illegal) business practices, and the end result of that was that nearly every computer sold for 15 years had a "Microsoft tax" added. Yup, exactly the same.
As I said, I can avoid doing business with Amazon just fine, whether I'm buying fidget spinners or a place to put a VM. I had no such option with the Microsoft of old.
When Microsoft was declared abusing its monopoly status, you could buy 100 different OSes from different vendors if you cared to, too.
Monopoly (abusing or not) is not about being able to buy stuff elsewhere, it's about what percentage of a market an entity has.
You can find amazon apps on Google PlayStore though.
Amazon is definitely the next Microsoft.
No wait, the next BMW! I tried to buy a Toyota and no BMW dealership would sell me one, can you believe it?
Nobody requires them to; they probably do that because it's profitable to them not because they are worried that someone will regard them as the next Microsoft in the pejorative sense.
The fact that Amazon sells their device that is similar to Google's and not Google's is perfectly sensible, if they regard that as a strategic thing which is reasonable given what it is.
It'd be more like Safeway refusing to sell Mission brand tortillas because they have Safeway brand tortilla chips and that's basically the same thing, right? It's made from flour into thin layers and you eat it.
While that is true, more importantly, they are their respective purveyors' spyware devices using which they intend to claw their way into people's lives to an even greater extent.
Amazon is more than happy to sell you other brands of USB cables or clothes, despite having their own "Amazon Basics" brand.
But they draw the line at other brands of eBook readers and media players.
- Safeway and BMW aren't known as "The Everything Store"
- You can buy Toyotas at a BMW dealership. They will be used, but they're there.
If I were to guess at what companines might rival Amazon in having the biggest selection, my top 3 would be: eBay, Alibaba, Rakuten.
To what extent would you say this eating you alive?
(BTW: that marketing claim comes from the "Everything"; a collection which is "biggest" isn't necessarily exhaustive; just bigger than others.)
I don't pretend to know what that broken user experience was.. ads blocked? No auto play next? No subscriber button? But anything along those lines would be a poor deal for YouTube. Im not a fan of either as they both engage in illegal anti-competitive behavior I just feel it isn't one sided in this case.
Were Amazon like Microsoft, as you claim, Amazon would sell competitor products that have an Amazon product built in, whether you want it or not, and it will be priced into the product.
(Disclaimer: this analogy to the 90s MS falls apart quickly. But unlike 90s MS, I am not yet forced to do business with Amazon if I don't want to.)
And is Microsoft buying a national grocery chain? Is Microsoft running a marketplace overrun with fake Chinese shit that takes 3 months to ship?
If I want a fake DVD, I can pay $3 in Chinatown, I don’t need to pay Amazon $20.
For a list of Amazon controversies, see [1]. It isn't complete. Example: it doesn't contain anything about MTurk [2].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazon.com_controversies
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazon_Mechanical_Turk#Labor_i...
Vendor lock-in is a pretty powerful tool. They may not be forcing anyone to "install" their systems into AWS, but once they're installed, they're too difficult to "uninstall." A fundamental requirement of free markets is for customers to be able to leave incumbents for new companies with fresher products that present a better value - if customers de-facto can't leave AWS, then AWS has monopoly power over those customers.
- Using third party proxies to avoid accountability for sale of countfeit products, and liability for the same.
- Using its market position and sock puppet partners to replicate and promote knockoff products.
- Using its domination of book market share to bully book publishers into a accepting its terms, and capriciously raising prices and removing pre-order options to those the tow the line. (Hachette)
- Notorious for poor working conditions, for both blue collar and white collar workforces.
I could go on, at length.
Amazon doesn’t force you to use your products, it instead raises the cost of everything you buy by owning the wholesale and distribution channels. Their UPS rates are the price floor. Their predatory tactics allow them to avoid collection of sales and use taxes — pushing them to the consumer. Their wholesale pricing is a price floor in many categories, or shared with WalMart.
Amazon is a monopolist and negative force in the American economy. They exist with their current business practices because the US courts changed their interpretation of what a monopoly is, which is now strictly determined by how corporate actions impact consumer retail prices.
Jeff Bezos is a true visionary, brilliant, and absolutely should be rewarded for that. We need more folks like him.
On the other hand, at what point has Amazon won enough? Selling things at a loss to drive competitors out of business verticals is surely bad for the consumer in the long-term no?
Not necessarily.
1. They can find efficiencies of scale in the system from operating in such large scale and vertical integration. Then its not bad for the customer.
2.If they have to raise prices when competition is out of business, competition will come back in sooner or later. So maybe its bad for customer in short term.
More folks doing the obvious (building an online everything-store) and driving it to a monopoly?
I'd rather we'd have several big online stores.
As for the other ventures Amazon is in, not impressed. I'd rather we'd have more in-company expertise, than a huge IaaS shop (whose price for convenience is central control, loss of privacy, and inflated costs that trickle to the consumers).
> Jeff Bezos is a true visionary, brilliant,
The guy has a business track record surpassing most, I will give you that -- however, I don't think this kind of idolatry is helpful to anyone, least of all yourself.
That's probably true of any billion dollar company founder, not to mention the (more than) trillion dollar Amazon.
> at what point has Amazon won enough? Selling things at a loss to drive competitors out of business verticals is surely bad for the consumer in the long-term no?
What do you mean by "enough"? Amazon is a public for-profit company and such companies are always looking for ways to improve their bottom line. If they see a dollar they can earn, they owe it to their shareholders to do everything they can to earn it.
If Amazon can improve its bottom line by driving competitors out, then that's what it'll do. It's naive to think that the good of the consumer is of any relevance.
I understand there's no legal obligation to do so, and that companies have a number of motives and desirable outcomes, of which giving money to shareholders is but one. It has become fashionable in recent years to suggest it's all about "shareholder value", but there's no supreme obligation to pursue that.
AWS has been light years ahead when it came to cloud computing and now they are having the first mover advantage and the dominant position. But will it last very long? It is very hard to say, over the years companies which were thought infallible have gone down.
It's more expensive to transfer data outside of AWS once than to store it on AWS for a quarter.
Not entirely sure what you meed by "anti-competitive steps taken by Microsoft in the '90s", but holding customer data hostage is as anti-competitive as it gets.
[0] https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/how-microsoft-builds-...
It might just be too early in the morning for me.
> Part of the reason AWS is gaining market share is because Microsoft’s Azure doesn’t boot virtual machines quite as fast.
Somehow I doubt the gap between virtual machine boot time (and this is mostly applicable only to EC2 vs. Azure Virtual Machines) is worth calling out. It might be due to existing developer buy-in and familiarity with AWS in addition to the continual investment in new services and price matching.
Why would I switch to Azure when AWS exceeds its offering and is priced just as competitively? These are complex platforms with real lock-in. Switching from AWS to anything else requires a substantial investment in learning new tools, technologies and best practices. So far AWS has made it so there's never been a compelling reason for most users.
> ... This too shall pass, but Microsoft will still be smaller. That’s why Redmond has staked out the Enterprise cloud market — alas, the segment most sensitive to such slow boot times.
On-premise cloud and enterprise customers care about virtual machine boot times that much huh? I'd love an example or some citation.
> AWS supports most startups as well as all 17 US intelligence agencies — taking 350,000 PCs out of places like the CIA, Thank Edward Snowden for that one. They are enjoying great success, though AWS partners aren’t enjoying themselves quite as much. Put simply, AWS is a pain to deal with if you are a customer big enough to be in personal communication and not just a credit card number. This, too, is like the old Microsoft.
Anything at all to backup these sentences? I'm not sure they belong together. How does the CIA moving to AWs connect with AWS being a pain to deal with if you're a big customer?
> Tech companies behave this way because most employees are young and haven’t worked anywhere else and because the behavior reflects the character of the founder. If the boss tells you to beat up customers and partners and it’s your first job out of college, then you beat up customers and partners because that’s the only world you know.
These two paragraphs are particularly ... cringely. Jeff Bezos in the vest with the muscular arms is imprinting on these young minds that they can treat customers and partners badly. I think. Somehow.
Google Cloud seems quite neat and in the same price range. OVH is much cheaper and uses OpenStack. Businesses in the Microsoft sphere should buy Azure quite easily. And there are many smaller, specialized providers for various needs.
Amazon's lead should be eroding not consolidating. Is it just that they were first and everyone standardised on their tools? Devops people choosing AWS on autopilot because it's what they know works?
BTW this has to be the best blog header in the business.
Google runs its own infrastructure on people food and then gives its customers dog food. Until Google is eating its own dog food, it will be a distant third in the cloud market. Amazon understands this. They eat their own dog food throughout the company. They take running their business on AWS to the extreme.
Microsoft is primarily hampered by the legacy of Windows. The modern cloud runs on Linux, not Windows. They're at 40% Linux VMs per recently announced numbers. If Azure succeeds, I think we'll see 80%+ Linux VMs.
I think current market share is misleading. The current market is less than 5% of what the total market will be in 5-10 years. What matters now is mind share not market share.
> OVH is much cheaper and uses OpenStack
Oh I definitely might get fired [1] for going with OVH.
[1] https://www.quora.com/What-does-the-phrase-Nobody-ever-got-f...
Or with ebooks, the problem isn;t "Amazon is too big," it was publishers and authors choosing which standard is the least likely to increase piracy and drive sales, and the customers who actually pay for goods choosing the marketplace that best serves them. If not Amazon, it would have been Sony or Kobo, but it couldn't ever be Smashwords once authors found how often works were pirated from that open platform.
I think people look for scapegoats rather than look at the hard truths about how the internet as a whole isn't particularly working for many types of business models. A lot of the protections that have evolved around physical businesses simply aren't as easy to have or are even available in a net-connected global economy, and the net tends to try and revive a lot of the nasty unregulated models of work from the past as well. Piecework, and penny auctions for example.
Is Amazon making it that easy to screw something like that up, or what is going on here? When you see a few random cases likes, you might think it's just an engineering making a dumb mistake, but this is starting to seem systematic, like there's a UX/UI issue at play here that makes all of these companies that should know better screw-up so easily. Or maybe Amazon just needs to make it hard to screw something like this up. So what's going on?
[1] - https://www.pcmag.com/news/357465/pentagon-accidentally-expo...
For example, S3 buckets are not public by default. The Pentagon is entirely to blame for the data breach. Amazon can't make it any harder to make this mistake, because publicly accessible buckets are an extremely common use case, and it is already an explicit choice.
I believe they are also starting to mail customers whos buckets are marked world-readble just to remind them there could be a security problem if they didn't mean to do this.
[I'll disclose that I'm quite biased against Sony. In fact, where possible, I avoid purchasing any Sony product at all...and it all goes back to the Sony rootkit scandal of early 2000s. I don't hold a grudge too often...but in this case, I still don't trust (nor wish to purchase anything from) Sony.]
If I want, for any reason, to not use Amazon, I can do that easily (even if I will have to pay more, it is my choice) by typing any other online store or seller into my browser, or going to a local store.
For the typical person, they cannot use anything other than Microsoft if they want to use a computer, period. Except Mac, which many can't afford and which is limiting in what programs it can run.
Currently Microsoft does not have a monopoly on computer OS. They have practically no stake in mobile computers (smart phones). Mac has a decent share of desktop/laptop usage. Any claim that MacOS is "limiting in what programs it can run" is a 10 year old argument or so one sided (Windows is also limiting in what programs it can run....). The Microsoft of 20 years ago _did_ have a monopoly on computer OS.
You may be speaking as someone techy. For most people, what I said still holds true.
[0] http://gs.statcounter.com/press/android-overtakes-windows-fo...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers#/m...