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What's missing from this is their fairly innovative product marketing decisions: They put full descriptions of their products, very comprehensive, out on full

What's missing from this is their fairly innovative product marketing decisions: They put full descriptions of their products, very comprehensive, out on full display, including pricing. Not only is pricing transparent, but it's not profit maximizing in the short run ... prices go down over time. You can sign up with a credit card and get going. Most companies, like Oracle - would have put this product behind a wall of idiot sales people and obfuscation. I've been using AWS since the start and I've never needed support - not a bit. This part of their operating paradigm should not be overlooked. It was a very gutsy decision to just throw everything over the fence and let 'whoever' use it. We take this for granted now, but it could have been another way entirely. Many other established companies still have not gotten the memo.

bigiain 10y ago
> Most companies, like Oracle - would have put this product behind a wall of idiot sales people and obfuscation. This can be really important. I've often had conversations that went something like: "How much will this cost to run?" "On AWS, $76US/month plus something under $5/month in bandwidth" "How much if we run it no Telstra's cloud" "No idea - the webste says 'call your account manager'". "Have you called them?" "No. I don't have a Telstra account manager. Let me know if you want to sort that out - or if we should just get it all running this morning on Amazon."
- jomamaxx 10y ago
  Big dumb companies and government agencies pay the price. Layers and layers of business people in between the actual product, nobody really sure what's going on... many of them are on 'cost plus' programs so they are incented to drive up cost. I worked for (then) Spar aerospace, making the Space Shuttle robot arm, paid for mostly by NASA and Canadian gov. We paid through the teeth for everything. And then collected 10% on top. It's a perverse system. That said, it keeps a lot of people employed. Oracle spends much more $ on sales than they do R&D, about 1/2 of their operation costs are 'sales' - meaning, that guy sitting there telling you about how great Oracle products are? 1/2 of your purchase price goes towards paying his salary. 'Business people' and 'sales people' are important components of the process, but when there is massive institutional gestation around these projects, it gets unwieldy very quickly. AWS is a move in the right direction and should help drive efficiencies in a lot of places.

bigiain 10y ago

> Most companies, like Oracle - would have put this product behind a wall of idiot sales people and obfuscation. This can be really important. I've often had conversations that went something like: "How much will this cost to run?" "On AWS, $76US/month plus something under $5/month in bandwidth" "How much if we run it no Telstra's cloud" "No idea - the webste says 'call your account manager'". "Have you called them?" "No. I don't have a Telstra account manager. Let me know if you want to sort that out - or if we should just get it all running this morning on Amazon."

jomamaxx 10y ago
Big dumb companies and government agencies pay the price. Layers and layers of business people in between the actual product, nobody really sure what's going on... many of them are on 'cost plus' programs so they are incented to drive up cost. I worked for (then) Spar aerospace, making the Space Shuttle robot arm, paid for mostly by NASA and Canadian gov. We paid through the teeth for everything. And then collected 10% on top. It's a perverse system. That said, it keeps a lot of people employed. Oracle spends much more $ on sales than they do R&D, about 1/2 of their operation costs are 'sales' - meaning, that guy sitting there telling you about how great Oracle products are? 1/2 of your purchase price goes towards paying his salary. 'Business people' and 'sales people' are important components of the process, but when there is massive institutional gestation around these projects, it gets unwieldy very quickly. AWS is a move in the right direction and should help drive efficiencies in a lot of places.