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Comment by wpietri | Hacker News Reader

This is a nice PR bit, but I wonder if it really matters?

I would be very reluctant to do a startup centered on, say, GMail or Amazon Marketplace as a platform. If you get too successful, it's too easy for them to say, "Hey, here's a proven high-value business for us to get into." And then they have my customer right there, so I'm screwed. (An example that comes to mind is Swype. They invented the swipeable virtual keyboard and made a great product. So great that Google added the feature to their own Android keyboard. And then released it for free on iOS, too.)

But I'm not worried at all about using their infrastructure services, because it doesn't give them much in way of competitive advantage. Netflix, for example, has a lot of their stuff running in AWS. Amazon has Prime Movies + TV as a direct competitor, but I don't think Netflix really cares. I as a consumer sure don't; from my perspective Netflix and Amazon are completely separate.

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> This is a nice PR bit, but I wonder if it really matters?

Over the last year I've seen a huge push to move away from AWS from retail clients. Azure is a lot more appealing because Microsoft doesn't compete with them.

Yet :)

Microsoft was famous for doing the same thing: http://www.paulgraham.com/road.html

> There is all the more reason for startups to write Web-based software now, because writing desktop software has become a lot less fun. If you want to write desktop software now you do it on Microsoft's terms, calling their APIs and working around their buggy OS. And if you manage to write something that takes off, you may find that you were merely doing market research for Microsoft.

Yeah, the notion that Microsoft is now the safe, cuddly tech company is mindblowing. They fucked so, so many people over:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_litigation#Private

  Spyglass, which licensed its browser to Microsoft in return for a percentage 
  of each sale; Microsoft turned the browser into Internet Explorer and bundled 
  it with Windows, giving it away to gain market share but effectively 
  destroying any chance of Spyglass making money from the deal they had signed 
  with Microsoft; Spyglass sued for deception and won a $8 million settlement.

Woah!

You can't discount first mover advantage. From your own example, Swype had immense mind and market share for many years, even after Google, Microsoft and others released their own alternatives. They were eventually bought out for over $100 million.

Sure, but their products were killed off. Their ~20% APR rate of return is decent, but not stellar. And you have to wonder if Nuance really go $100m worth of value out of the acquisition; in retrospect it looks like buying at the top of the market

Regardless, I think it's inarguable that they would have been worth a lot more had they not been killed off by the platforms they did so much for.

Eventually, I get a new phone. I'm certainly not going to go after Swype if Gboard has its only USP built right in (and better overall integration)

Pretty much this.

I used Swype for a while. IIRC they were not helping themselves : you had to reinstall the app after a while because it would automatically stop working.

I also personally disliked how the keyboard looked with swype.

When the default keyboard started having this feature, there was no point in installing this bothersome app anymore.

Netflix used other things for CDN($$$), and is doing shows themself($$$). Never really used fancy aws expect for pay vps-per-second and out-bandwidth-per-byte.

They also use S3.

>Never really used fancy aws expect for pay vps-per-second and out-bandwidth-per-byte.

This doesn't seem true, based on all of the things they talked about using at Re:Invent last year.

https://medium.com/netflix-techblog/netflix-at-aws-re-invent...

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