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Comment by PragmaticPulp | Hacker News Reader

> I had a conversation with a traditional retailer who was afraid of using Heap for analytics because we used AWS for hosting, which is owned by Amazon, their biggest competitor.

It sounds foreign now, but when AWS was new this happened all of the time: Companies who saw Amazon as a competitor in some way usually had someone, somewhere in management who was afraid of using anything hosted on AWS.

It sounds silly now, but I remember having a lot of these conversations back when AWS was new. Typically, the older the company's management, the more likely they were to be afraid of using AWS for anything related to their business.

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Anyone in the traditional retail space is trying to avoid Amazon. A. Because anyone in the retail space likely DOES have older management, and B. They're not entirely wrong; even if Amazon doesn't pull the rug out from under them, they're still indirectly writing checks to help fund their largest competitor.

I wouldn’t call it silly at all, it just depends on how strategic your failure is to Amazon’s success. At some point you become materially exposed to their decision making.

AWS promise they don't look at their customers data, but if it turns out they actually are then putting your Amazon-competitor-business analytics data in AWS would be incredibly bad for you.

Would you really trust Amazon enough to take that risk?

There would need to be an massively good reason to do that, and "incrementally better analytics" isn't it.

AWS are not looking at customers data as it would be professional suicide. It would only require one disgruntled employee to leak this. Realistically they don't even have to as a proxies version of this data can be bought.

AWS are not looking at customers data as it would be professional suicide.

This is why it comes down to trusting Amazon. Essentially the question is "Do you trust Amazon not to do something that would be 'professional suicide', like accessing a rival company's AWS data, enough to risk giving them your data?" If you're running an online retailer that's a competitor to Amazon you should probably fall on the side of caution because companies do stupid shit all the time.

There are plenty of reports of:

- Amazon predatory pricing

- Amazon trying to mistreat their workers (including AWS) as much as they can

- Amazon/AWS copying products, FOSS software, and messing up with companies that they invest into.

- Their complicity with all the scams going on their store.

- And a big, big etc

But, but, Amazon is not AWS! Amazon is retail and is a different environment! Yes, but it is under the same people.

Amazon's the scary-looking flea market on the wrong side of town with the barbed wire on the roof and a couple tough-looking guys conspicuously hanging out out front, with half the stalls full of stuff that definitely "fell off the back of the truck" and the rest selling fake Rolexes and shit.

Doing that at scale doesn't make them more trustworthy. Or it shouldn't. Then again I guess if you're a super-creepy stalker at large enough scale then you're Facebook or Google and instead of getting probation and a restraining order you get billions of dollars, so maybe it does work that way.

The line that divides "the data of an AWS customer" from "the data of an AWS product" is rather faintly drawn. The latter is often sufficient proxy for the former to make business decisions on.

Exactly. It's like promising not to snoop phone conversations when all the valuable information is in the metadata, or like promising to avoid using swords in an era where people fight with guns.

Except Amazon (retail) apparently does look at customer data to figure out what AmazonBasics products to launch

Not silly at all. Premise is pretty simple: why would you fund your competitor's cash flow (either directly or indirectly).

GCP and Azure successfully acquired a lot of retailers and ecommerce providers for this reason. This happens even today with medium to large size competitors of Amazon.

Why is it silly? you van use other clouds and not prop up your direct competitor

Agree that you can choose not to use AWS yourself if you see them as a competitor. But to refuse to use any service that itself uses AWS would severely limit who you can work with.

Most aren't in a position to insist but companies like Walmart do lean on vendors to provide a non-AWS version.

It’s like not buying a candy bar from the closest supermarket because you own one yourself (no matter how distant).

I think it's more like not buying Starbucks when you own your own coffeeshop...

This still happens. Same for GitHub/Microsoft and Azure. Probably Google, too, though I've not seen that personally. Haven't seen it for CloudFlare but there definitely should be companies close enough to the spaces they're growing into that they'd be well-advised not to send traffic through them if they can avoid it.

There's probably room for niche services selling "we're not hosted on 'the cloud', aren't owned by anyone likely to be in competition with you, and control our hardware" but there's a lot of overlap there with companies/owners/managers who take this to the point of not trusting anything that isn't self-hosted (because there might be security problems, nevermind that DIYing is at least as likely to have such problems, or because they fear vendor lock-in to a perhaps unhealthy degree), so it might be a hard market to sell to.

It's not like AWS controls the sole source of fire. Companies these days have wised up and know they can roll their own 'good enough' solution and customers won't have much choice to do much about it but keep feeding the beast. I remember when I genuinely believed the netflix creation myth, of this fabled streaming service that would swallow up the world and have all movies and TV in one place. Companies who ultimately hold all this IP and have these heaps of cash wised up, wait on the sidelines, poach people, and come out with stuff like Peacock thats good enough, and customers have no alternative if they want to watch stuff that only comes to that particular platform. Streaming services are the most visible examples of companies rolling their own solutions to not be beholden to other companies, but its extending to all sectors of tech.

On the streaming topic: piracy is becoming rampant again due to subscription fatigue and player fragmentation. So there is an alternative if people don't want to pay up.

No clue why MPAA couldn't pull an RIAA and have everything in one place like you see on apple music or spotify. 99 million legitimate music streaming accounts in the U.S. today, what a number. The only service offering something similar for video is piracy software that manages to outclass every streaming service from all these multi billion dollar companies in ux.

Music is sufficiently low cost that the owners of music do not mind giving it up for less money.

Owners of video media apparently want more money, and are betting they can earn more by not giving up control to others and selling for cheap.

I am inclined to agree with the owners of video. If people wanted easy access to all the video/tv shows, they could right now pay the various services. It is not that time consuming or laborious, it just costs a hundred or two hundred dollars per month.

The fact that people do not, means that people are not willing to pay that much per month (on top of tv service subscriptions, which come with live sports).

I think they are leaving a ton of money on the table acting this way, taking their ball and going home out of pride instead of making more money.

For one, subscriber counts would go way up just like how literally 1/3 of Americans are allegedly legitimate music streamers, because paying one fixed price for literally almost all recorded sound is a pretty good deal in the eyes of consumers. For two, you'd end up with higher 'real' subscriber counts with a one stop service; right now its probably $90 a month at least for an individual to subscribe to all the popular streaming services which is why literally everyone I know is sharing account passwords with like three other people rather than shelling out the same price as the old evil cable bill. Personally, I'd be happy to pay $10 a month for a one stop shop and not have to deal with texting my brother to ask when he will be done watching Survivor on the shared netflix account.

All this would add up to more customers lining up with more money, but its not done seemingly out of some false sense in these executives that their Disney+ or their Peacock will somehow capture market share (which by definition means securing more of the limited available popular IP) in a world where IP holders no longer play ball with eachother.

It sounded silly 5 years ago, now it sounds very smart.

AWS' byzantine billing is also good grounds for reasonable caution, especially for a new startup.

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