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Comment by ecaron | Hacker News Reader

After trying for 3 weeks to make AWS WorkSpaces work for my company, I can still confidently say that Amazon doesn't get it. Their solutions are more "Go to Home Depot and get the parts to make a desk", whereas Google Apps is "go to Ikea". The two solutions are neighbors, but not everyone is ready to buy the individual boards and cut them down to size.

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Your comparison is bang on, except that's the point. Amazon isn't trying to be Ikea. It is absolutely trying to provide the building blocks for small companies and large to use their cloud platform in a very foundational manner. Yes, the onboarding cost may be high, but Amazon doesn't mind if customers end up using Heroku or EngineYard instead - they are customers too.

AWS is a lot like Linux that way: Deeply challenging initial learning curve, but the only thing worth considering for serious mission critical architecture. Stability and scalability does come at the cost of user-friendliness.

Are you saying there's a security and scalability to Amazon over Google Apps? People still make that argument about in house vs hosted, but hosted vs hosted of two major providers is new to me.

I don't know about security and scalability, but from what I read, it seems that Amazon gives you fine grain control and AD integration which is nice. Also, customer support is one area where AWS is better than Google in my opinion. YMMV.

Amazon's customer service basically exists where Google's doesn't.

People often don't realize what a chasm of difference that is.

It doesn't help Google any that Amazon's customer service is _great_.

As a follow-up, the General Manager of Amazon WorkSpaces reached out to me and asked for my feedback. This is one place where the Ikea-analogy holds true. Just like Home Depot, Amazon has workers that engage with their customers and know how to build; like Ikea, getting a Google employee's attention typically requires a plane ticket and a healthy dose of good luck...

AWS, I still <3 you.

If I'm building a company, I absolutely want Home Depot and not Ikea. If I'm building a weekend project, sure, Ikea is great.

And beyond that, I absolutely don't want to have to rely on Google's customer support or pricing/platform stability for anything that really matters to me, and my company's infrastructure really, really matters to me.

Agreed, while they have some excellent services some other products lose the usability/practicality game . e.g: video transcoding service compared to zen coder, or cloud front service compared to cloud flare.

I'm so happy I was able to talk my bosses out of Workspaces. It would have been an expensive mess for us

I tried AWS Zocalo (document store and collaboration) and it was close to feature-free. I have no idea why they released it in that state. I generally like AWS stuff, but Zocalo is a real turkey.

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