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Comment by aeturnum | Hacker News Reader

This has real "company scrip" vibes that I am not crazy about. I'm sure it will be good in the short term for companies that are already using a lot of AWS services and have a lot of sales on the Amazon app store[1], but long term doubling down on Amazon's offerings seems risky.

I wonder if the solution, instead of breaking up amazon et. al., is to subsidize small companies' spend in the space in a way that effectively equalizes subsidies. These pricing strategies matter the most when you are small and dealing with a lot of cashflow problems and there's a real risk that you choose the provider you can afford and then get stuck.

[1] does anyone have a lot of sales on the amazon app store....?

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Think you mean "scrip", not "script".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Company_scrip

New word of the day! This one is going to come in handy.

I absolutely do! Thank you.

Amazon would pay their employees in store credit if they thought they could get away with it.

It is weird how we allow monopolistic behavior if the company is part of an oligopoly rather than a pure monopoly. If we agree this is an abusive business practice, the specific market share of Amazon's app store shouldn't matter.

I'm wondering whether Google in their Play Store revenue cut reduction considered doing the same thing but decided against it due to the antitrust risk.

Similar to company scrip, this reminds me of "Charles Robin and Company" from the Gaspé region of Canada. The company was an exporter of fish that abused its monopoly position in the market. Fishermen were independent businesses but Robin's company was both buying the fishermens' catch (thus setting its price) and also the mortgage lender for the fishing boats (so they controlled their debt too).

If the Amazon Bux are transferrable, it is less of a problem.

If they aren't, well, yeah, they're crack coupons.

Isn't any compute more-or-less transferable (presumably at less than AWS's dollar cost) if you take it and mine some currency with it? I assume there's something out there that effectively buy spares cycles if you install a client. Or resell S3 space. (And yes, this may be potentially dangerous to your AWS account reputation.)

Sure, but it’s almost certainly going to be exchangeable for a very small portion of its face value.

This is actually something that I'm hoping that eventually homomorphic encryption would enable. Right now it's kind of a bad idea to buy leased out computation time from arbitrary sources. "Hey, I have all these AWS credits and I want to recoup the value of them, so I'll give you a 10% discount on compute time. Uh oh, it turns out I'm also a competitor for your protein folding endeavor, so I'll be analyzing your inputs to steal your secrets and then returning faulting outputs." I suppose you could just demand admin access to their AWS account and lock them out for the duration of your lease, but that's just as bad idea for them as the opposite is for you.

If we had efficient homomorphic encryption, then we could just sell so many operations. Then someone looking to lease second hand computation could just put a counter in the output to make sure they're actually running the full amount and bingo cryptographically certain results.

Eh I mean that’s what Amazon is hoping but it only happens if you start depending on the AWSBucks.

* Pay 30% to Apple or Google on their stores.

* Pay 20% to Amazon on their store and get 10% in AWS credits.

If you just treat it like the credits are worthless then it might still be a good deal. But probably not since Amazon is cutting fees and offering incentives because their store has so few customers. The Microsoft store had similar programs a while back and it didn’t really go anywhere.

People always focus on the Apple “tax” but forget that the App Store and the Play Store’s value are as sales channels and they can get away with charging that much because in aggregate publishers will make more money paying it than not being in the store. Amazon doesn’t have that value prop currently.

Except for developers starting out, it's 15% to Apple or Google if you're making under 1 million.

I'm very confused why Amazon changed their cut and are still above the big players (unless you value AWS credits 1:1 with dollars).

Might incentize some new spendings on AWS service.

Given that Amazon already makes a lot of money on AWS and that they have lots of cash on hand, I am very skeptical that they need more financial incentives to be able to develop new services.

Like, this could happen, but it feels like the marginal utility of the "aws buks" are near zero for Amazon itself.

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