3 ms·
Because they want to lock their customers to their platform. AWS has the biggest marketshare, so if a smaller provider adopts AWS's api, that means that AWS cus
by jolmg 9y ago
Because they want to lock their customers to their platform. AWS has the biggest marketshare, so if a smaller provider adopts AWS's api, that means that AWS customers can easily migrate to them.
I do wonder how we managed to get standard protocols adopted for email. What did email providers use before SMTP and IMAP? Maybe the key difference then from now was that the internet community was much smaller? Did Mark Crispin simply write the RFC for IMAP, email vendors noticed on their own, and adopted the protocol? Or was the emailing community then so small that there were no vendors and it was really just a handful of programmers, who could discuss and agree on protocols via something like Usenet and implement their own clients and servers?
- philsnow 9y agomore the latter. long ago, to get access to mail or usenet you generally were a technically minded person at one of a few universities or large corporations like DEC. to give a sense of the scale involved, check out http://olduse.net/blog/current_usenet_map/ http://olduse.net/blog/current_usenet_map/ . There were on the order of between dozens and hundreds of machines, and you would send mail to a person on a given machine by figuring out (by hand?) a path from your machine to that machine and include the names of all the machines in a "bang path" http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/B/bang-path.html http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/B/bang-path.html Also, before SMTP there was UUCP (which was used for both mail and usenet).