I predict Amazon will acquire Lyft in the next 18 months | Hacker News Reader

I predict Amazon will acquire Lyft in the next 18 months

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> Additionally, with a Lyft acquisition, Amazon would acquire yet another interesting asset, Detroja notes: Lyft's self-driving technology, which highlights an area that Amazon has expressed growing interest in over the past year.

This is the bit of the article that makes the most sense. Amazon is already a large player in several different technology market, but hasn't got publicly visible investment into self driving vehicle, that would help with their current trend of automating warehouse/distribution center. I think the author is a bit mislead with the whole gig economy.

OG post: https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:6462686...

Interesting idea, but there's several problems.

- Uber is one of AWS's most important customers. If Amazon does a move that directly competes with Uber, to the point where Uber loses significant market share, enterprise customers will certainly lose trust in AWS. This is already an issue for AWS - Satya just gloated about it during the earnings call - but such a high-profile case as Uber vs. Lyft will only drive this point home further, allowing Azure to accelerate (which is already growing faster than AWS).

- Amazon makes no money, except through AWS. Purchasing Lyft is a significant investment over a a long time, and the money has to come from somewhere. If AWS lags during this critical juncture, this could cripple Amazon hugely.

- And Amazon has no giant cash pile sitting around like Apple. It cannot afford to cannibalize customer trust in AWS when it is imperative to their survival. See: their stock dropping, partly because their growth slowed slightly, and partly because it seems Azure's growth is faster.

You are communicating in a thoughtful, reasonable, and logical manner.

Now throw logic and reason out the Window.

Amazon is a business that raised a lot of growth capital without making any profits.

The CEO thought it wise to buy a publication critical of the leader of the political party in power that supports their ruthless push for efficiency at all costs.

It’s also really hard to leave Amazon if you invest at scale in using their ecosystem.

They may flip a coin and decide that losing Uber is worth being a player in the coming transportation as a service economy. An industry that is widely expected to be high volume high margin. It’s ecavtly what they seek to bleed every penny of margin out of with their ruthless efficiency.

> - Amazon makes no money, except through AWS. Purchasing Lyft is a significant investment over a a long time, and the money has to come from somewhere. If AWS lags during this critical juncture, this could cripple Amazon hugely.

Did you forget Prime? Then there is Amazon Media Group, A9 etc.

In fact with PrimeNow and AmazonFresh, AMZN gets the readymade footprint of last mile delivery network. Not to mention same network can be utilized for last mile delivery of urgent/priory shipments via Prime/AMZN.

> - And Amazon has no giant cash pile sitting around like Apple. It cannot afford to cannibalize customer trust in AWS when it is imperative to their survival. See: their stock dropping, partly because their growth slowed slightly, and partly because it seems Azure's growth is faster.

Eh, it's just one customer that gets lost due to this (albeit big one). And I doubt Uber is sticking around AWS because of AWS brand, in fact most likely they are sticking around due to combination of tech debt and cheaper deal that they are getting. Why can't they move to GCP (ala Spotify) or Azure if they get better deal there?

The point isn't losing merely Uber; the point is losing trust. Granted this is a competitor talking, here is Satya a few days ago: "No customer wants to be dependent on a provider that sells them technology on one end and competes with them on the other." Uber and Lyft is one of the great tech rival stories of our time. If Amazon comes in and crushes Uber, will any startup trying to make it big want to use AWS?

I co-founded a startup, and lot of my friends work at or run startups. At the end of the day everyone realizes, AWS/GCP/Azure etc. are all infrastructure players. It is given that all big 3 cloud providers will be competing against you in one way or other. And infrastructure becomes a cost center once you start growing. So doesn't matter whether you are competing against them or not. Even Apple uses GCP. At certain scale, the costs questions starts popping up a lot.

>> If Amazon comes in and crushes Uber, will any startup trying to make it big want to use AWS?

Heck yeah! And startups are not the bread and butter of AWS. They are trying to go upstream with enterprise and government contracts that are multi million $$.

Netflix is one of AWS's most important customers, and Amazon competes directly with them, Netflix is probably one of the best advertisements for AWS too. Similarly, Apple is one of Samsung's biggest customers (2.6% of sales), and they're fierce competitors, being competitors doesn't necessarily mean that companies can't be customers of each other.

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