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Amazon can invest heavily in new tech because it has millions of customers who get the benefit. BofA can only invest in new tech to the degree that it benefits
by earthshots 7y ago
Amazon can invest heavily in new tech because it has millions of customers who get the benefit. BofA can only invest in new tech to the degree that it benefits one (admittedly large) customer. This makes the decision seem more suspect in the long-run.
- daxelrod 7y agoCounterpoint: BoFA can invest in tech that makes sense for its specialized use case that Amazon never would.
- earthshots 7y agoTo the degree that BofA has needs that are unique just to itself, and do not overlap other large business's use cases, this is true. But that seems like an awfully small degree. A billion dollars sounds like a ton of money on HN, but that's a thousand person tech team for 3 or 4 years. It's enough to do some good tech, but it's very, very easy to spend that much engineering capacity.
- Retric 7y agoThis is 2 billion dollars per year. That’s 6-8,000 people working full time indefinitely. Further they don’t need to spend that on staff they can have a large dev team, better hardware, more bandwidth, a 100 person support team 24/7 365, and still save money.