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Comment by EpicEng | Hacker News Reader

I doubt any one company's use of AWS makes a bit of difference in their ability to keep the lights on. You "funding" them in some round about way is irrelevant.

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I guess you're missing the point. It is not the money that matters more here, it is the collective business intelligence that Amazon gets access to, for free - for example, if one FBA seller leaves Amazon, no big deal. Even if a thousand FBA sellers leave Amazon, it is still no big deal for Amazon, because they have something more important than any money they could've earned from those FBA sellers - data. They did zero work (market research, advertising etc), but they know precisely what is selling well and where. If they keep doing this for a while (which they have), then they are in many more verticals in a few short years.

It is like these FBA sellers are paying Amazon, then giving valuable data to them and helping Amazon put them out of business. It is just a shitty situation

Just dropping this in, Amazon is about to purchase Sizmek which is a major player in online advertising - the main competitor to G's Doubleclick advertiser solutions.

So they'll get even more data on the marketing side.

I think you're just changing "the point" as I replied to this direct quote:

>Through your business with AWS you are now funding a large, fierce, and direct competitor.

No one here is talking about FBA's or the Amazon marketplace; they're talking about using AWS and having Amazon infiltrate your product space down the road.

FBA or AWS, I think the same argument holds - AWS and Amazon in general are so big, that they wouldn't care if a few hundred (or even a few thousand) smaller clients leave them. The data they lose matters more than the money.

That said, you are funding a fierce competitor, even if your AWS bill is just 10 bucks a month...

It's not the same though. If you jump in and start selling merch in Amazon then you are entering _their_ space directly and using their platform to do so. As you said, you're not only handing them money; you're handing them all of your data.

Using AWS to build your back end before finding out that Amazon is now going to enter your market is hardly the same thing. Your handful of VMs make exactly zero difference. AWS or no, Amazon was going to eat your lunch.

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