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Comment by falcolas | Hacker News Reader

So long as we can save a few pennies and a few minutes by utilizing Amazon, there will be no boycott of any meaningful size.

Also, user comments in the Reddit thread about the "comfort break" incident indicate that AWS is Amazon's primary source of revenue these days. This is backed up by much of Amazon's own PR reporting. For a boycott to have any meaningful impact against Amazon, it would have to include a hit against that revenue.

Call it pessimism, but it's my opinion that few if any companies will incur the costs to move their own business out of Amazon simply to penalize them for poor working conditions in another section of the company.

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> For a boycott to have any meaningful impact against Amazon, it would have to include a hit against that revenue [AWS]

I disagree, for two reasons:

1. By that logic, Amazon would shut down or sell off their consumer sales business because it's not worth bothering with.

2. Even if (hypothetically) the shareholders and top-level managers of Amazon didn't care about consumer sales, there is a lower-level (but still fairly high) manager whose sole responsibility is consumer sales. If a boycott substantially hurts those sales, their personal career prospects are hurt, so you can bet they would care enough to change how their part of the business operates.

Of course, this is academic because I agree with this:

> So long as we can save a few pennies and a few minutes by utilizing Amazon, there will be no boycott of any meaningful size.

> AWS is Amazon's primary source of revenue these days

Source on that please? I'm highly dubious.

Inaccurate wording on my part. AWS is amazon's primary source of "operational income" (i.e. raw revenue minus operational costs) these days. $1.17 billion for AWS vs. $0.35 billion for Amazon as a whole, for Q3 2017.

https://www.cnbc.com/2017/10/26/aws-earnings-and-revenue-q3-...

I see, I see. Thank you for clarifying.

Just pulled up their filings[1], and I'm almost certainly misreading it, but in Q3 2017:

  NA Retail Revenue: $25,446M
  NA Retail Profit:  $   112M
  AWS Revenue:       $ 4,584M
  AWS Profit:        $ 1,171M

Pedantically, it seems like AWS is not Amazon's primary source of revenue, but is the primary source of profit.

[1] https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1018724/000101872417...

AWS is also the primary driver behind amazons stock price.

Within a few months or years amazons shopping marketplace could become eclipsed by another. Consumers can switch brands quite quickly if they see a better service elsewhere.

AWS on the other hand is very hard to migrate from. Can you imagine the investment necessary to move a large company off AWS infrastructure, when you have legacy and unsupported services that nobody knows how they work, depends on intricacies of amazons managed services, and have no way of doing zero downtime data migration?

Basically, Amazon can gradually increase the price of existing AWS services, while lowering the price of all new services to attract new customers. (Think "From 2019 we will be releasing S4, the new cheaper data storage system!").

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