10 ms·
When AWS, Azure, or GCP Becomes the Competition
- aynsof 7y agoIt misses a couple of big ones: 1. Offer a great user experience. Many cloud providers are just pumping products out the door with little to no concern for UX. 2. Have great personality. That could be through offering outstanding support, or through being the kind of company that people root for. (Honeycomb.io is a good example of this.)
- sl1ck731 7y agoCurious, why do you say that about honeycomb specifically? Not that I've heard of them just seems pretty random.
- k__ 7y agoGood question. While I think a bunch of nice people work there I have the feeling that the industry sees their opinions as quite controversial.
- gk1 7y agoAt the level of five- and six-figure software licenses, "personality" doesn't matter much to buyers. True UX—not UI, which often gets confused with UX—could matter only if it affects org-wide adoption or ease of use for non-technical users.
- jb_s 7y agoUX doesn't usually factor into purchasing decisions at bigcorps anyway. It's usually a matrix with products on rows and desired features in columns. The chosen product is the one that ticks all the boxes. Engineers who bring actual domain knowledge into the discussion are ignored because more complex background information and criteria means more work and more discussions with the board.
- hinkley 7y agoOf the many people who hated Microsoft during their rise to power, one of the most coherent groups were people who were mad because MS put a competitor with an arguably better product out of business. That is in fact how FUD got into the vernacular. They would make vague promises that you couldn't quite call outright lies about having a product coming in that market, and a year later they'd put out something tepid (thereby proving they were lying about their progress earlier), but with some bulk licensing deal. By the time the MS product came out the competitor would already be experiencing reduced sales growth because people would play wait-and-see for the MS product. There is nothing stopping any of these folks from pulling the same trick. Having a better product will not save you. A brilliant product might, but even that's not a given.
- user5994461 7y agoWho is gonna play wait-and-see in this day and age? We're not in the 90's where one had to wait for the product to be announced, then built, then shipped on a CD.
- adrianmsmith 7y agoIf a product has lots of integrations within your company, or if you store lots of data in it which would need to be migrated to another product (e.g. a database), or if lots of people in your company need to receive training for the product, then it might make sense to wait 6 months to see what product the big player is going to come out with, rather than choosing a smaller niche vendor.
- gk1 7y agoThere are many more examples that I did not include. Like Redis (and AWS Elasticache), MongoDB, Cassandra, Akamai (and AWS Cloudfront), etc. Any others?
- patrickaljord 7y agogitlab
- reilly3000 7y agoTimescale/Influx, Neptune/multiple graphdbs, activeMQ/MQ, Kafka, Kubernetes, Hadoop/EMR, Athena/presto, Spark/Glue+Kinesis, Iron.io, even CloudWatch log insights eating other log platforms.
- paragraft 7y agoAuth0 (and others) and Cognito (which is a good example of the incumbents thriving because I don't know anybody who's that happy with Cognito)
- m_ke 7y agoIf you're doing anything ML related your best bet is to niche down and solve a very narrow problem for a specific industry / market segment. Building generic AI tooling sounds great but rarely solves anyones problems.
- gk1 7y agoAgreed. One of the possible differentiators I list in the article is being an "end-to-end solution." It's going to be a long while before AWS builds AI for accounting, or for optimizing industrial operations, or for... you get it.
- generatorguy 7y agoI have yet to hear of an example of a factory or plant using AI for optimizing industrial operations. Anybody known of any?
- mttddd 7y agoI imagine there are some, a lot of factory operation optimization uses heavy operations research which isnt a huge jump to some sort of AI/ML
- digsy 7y agohttps://nordcloud.com/10-examples-of-ai-in-manufacturing-to-inspire-your-smart-factory/ https://nordcloud.com/10-examples-of-ai-in-manufacturing-to-...
- lostmsu 7y agoInteresting, as I went down this route: made a niche ML product, and did not open source. As it is a framework-level library, I also think quite a bit of time will pass before AWS or Azure will even notice the opportunity, because you need to be technical to see it. Actually, Azure already has ML.NET, but it is about classical machine learning, and their own deep learning product, CNTK, lost the marketing fight with TensorFlow and PyTorch. Which is where I come in :)
- 7y ago
- avaika 7y agoWait, isn't it like any other market which already has long lasting players? If you want no competition -- find a new market (and win it). Otherwise you have to be smarter and faster than existing players.
- cj 7y agoYou can probably draw a parallel between the retail sector and the phenomenon discussed in the article. For example: Decades ago (before Walmart, Target, etc), it was common to have many small specialized stores that did just 1 thing really well (ie. selling just books, selling just shoes, selling just office supplies). Over time, Walmart/Target came along and bundled all of those specialty stores into 1 giant store that sells everything, causing a lot of the small specialty stores to eventually fade away. AWS/GCP/Azure is sort of like the "Walmart of B2B Internet Services" in that they are in direct competition with companies like MongoDB, Akamai, and the other examples from the article re: offering comparable managed services. As a market matures, the market consolidates into a small number a big players. To survive, specialty shops need to do things that the big players won't or can't, which I think the article does a good job discussing.
- ClumsyPilot 7y agoOligopoly is common, that does not mean oligopoly is good.
- 9nGQluzmnq3M 7y agoThe other option is to partner up with Big Cloud. They all offer marketplace programs that let customers install third-party software quickly and easily, and take care of the billing too (for a price, of course).
- gk1 7y agoI address this in the article. Unfortunately (for the startup) being in one of the Big Cloud partner programs does not prevent them from launching directly competitive products.
- bern4444 7y agoIt probably only makes it easier for them as well since they can see what add ons/tools are the most consumed. Then they can use that data to figure out what features they should build next for their tools
- gawi 7y agoNice plug in the middle of middle of the article, exactly at the right spot: > By the way, I write an article like this every month or so, covering lessons learned from growing B2B software startups. Get an email update when the next one is published This is the closest I got to subscribing to a newsletter.
- gk1 7y ago> This is the closest I got to subscribing to a newsletter. Almost got you, huh? :) I've A/B tested various locations and the inline-embed is the best, by far. This is also why many news sites now include related stories in the middle of the article, not at the end.
- mey 7y agoWish the rss/atom was better represented, rather than only existing in metadata on your site. I must be a dying breed, but I refuse to sign up for email newsletters. I refuse to hand over that much of my attention. Edit: https://www.gkogan.co/feed.xml https://www.gkogan.co/feed.xml
- alexis_fr 7y agoThat’s interesting. So RSS didn’t stick because it didn’t allow advertisers to harvest email addresses. Which is stupid because you still can’t reach to your audience if you just buy harvested addresses, so if it’s just people who subscribed to your newsletter, you’re just better off letting them subscribe to your RSS. Perhaps the quantifiability of newsletters vs RSS makes email win. If only RSS had embedded ways to count views and see what users looked at.
- nilkn 7y agoPro-tip: create a dedicated email for newsletters so you don't feel like they're spamming you or clogging your inbox. Ever since I did this I really enjoy finding the occasional unique newsletter.
- RcouF1uZ4gsC 7y ago> Think Twice Before Open-Sourcing I think it is a problem that it is very hard to monetize open source infrastructure libraries. In the past, you could try to do consulting or else offer paid hosting. Now with the cloud providers doing "zero management" hosting of open source libraries, both those avenues have been seriously curtailed. Honestly, it seems like if you are the primary author of a popular open source library, your best bet is try to leverage that notoriety into getting hired by one of the cloud companies, and try to work on the open source library as a side project. Trying to use that open source library to support yourself any other way, seems destined for penury and misery.
- techntoke 7y agoIf it is being heavily used just invest in making a nice website where you can offer professional services and SaaS deployment with advanced features.
- btown 7y agoThis is quite literally what the parent is arguing that the cloud providers are making obsolete.
- _hyn3 7y agoFor a large, VC-backed open-source startup with many employees, yes, the cloud providers have made this obsolete to a large extent, Open Core not withstanding. For a single author of a popular open-source product or library, it's still very possible to earn a good living working on the thing that you built.
- mistrial9 7y agono, this is not so black & white. Lets take it in two parts 'Free' and 'Open Source'. One use of Open Source is to participate in science; define, expand, fork, integrate, extend. A different use of 'Free' is to become the standard upon which the infrastructure depends; hard game, but big results. One author may steer or originate, but over time, Free and Open Source, is the work of many authors, many architectural components, and many network nodes. Said another way, to understand the motivations of Free and Open Source, one must be able to see beyond one author, to the effects on systems, and systems of systems. Much of the benefits of both Free and Open Source, are not mainly to one author, but to systems, and over time. This is important, as much of basic computing would not exist as it is now, except for sacrifice and insights by earlier authors and teams.
- hmart 7y agoThere will not be another Dropbox.
- mac01021 7y agoWhat does that mean?
- vivekl 7y agoWhile AWS has ruffled a bunch of feathers with their Elasticsearch and Kafka managed offerings which can be easily construed as attempts to steam roll the respective open source-first entities, I am actually quite impressed by the mechanism that Azure has employed with Azure Managed Applications: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/managed-applications/overview https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/managed-applications/.... Hashicorp recently announced their collaboration with Azure to bring forth managed consul offering using this: https://www.hashicorp.com/blog/announcing-consul-service-on-azure/ https://www.hashicorp.com/blog/announcing-consul-service-on-... This in my opinion is the right way to solve the problem, i.e. provide the customers that want a managed offering the means to get a managed version directly from the entity most active behind the project, (e.g. Hashicorp) while getting the most from the cloud provider's infrastructure. I would be willing to trust Confluent or Hashicorp with operating/managing my Kafka or consul cluster but taking another dependency on their respective cloud offerings should be of concern. I am quite surprised that its Azure that has shown creativity here while AWS and Google have limited themselves to offering marketplace AMIs/images at ridiculous markups.
- ClumsyPilot 7y agoI am not. Microsoft was always a partner driven company. Most of their sales are through their partners, and they have learned to respect that. They have also learned to build platform, unlike MacOS/Android, windows will never pull APIs out form under you.
- Aperocky 7y agoAnd windows basically sucks, in no small part due to the historical baggage it must carry. That and it’s not nix
- ClumsyPilot 7y agoTrue, but an operating system should be a solid foundation to build on, not quicksand. We now have a situation where a well designed and complete 5 year old application will arbitrarily stop working because someone made an 'improvement' to the OS.
- caniszczyk 7y agoTerrible blog post, they completely forget to mention Mesos which owned the orchestration market before Docker Swarm and Kubernetes
- elamje 7y agoYikes, that’s a little harsh considering the good discussion going on before and after your comment.
- caniszczyk 7y agoThere is good discussion but there is a lot of hyperbole, how many companies can you name that have been killed by these hyperscale cloud providers? Many seem to be doing well: https://a16z.com/2019/10/04/commercializing-open-source/ https://a16z.com/2019/10/04/commercializing-open-source/ Some just may not be worth their oversized valuations in the long run but made choices to be valued much larger than their actual worth.
- mrskitch 7y agoI think a lot of this depends on what your product or audience is. If you're a domain-expert in your niche then lots of folks would rather go with you since they'll have you in their corner versus someone just trying to get it running half-assed. There's also the "you're not amazon so we're going with you" mentality amongst a lot of folks out there. Simply not being one of these giants can be a differentiator, especially for folks outside the US. My anecdotal story is when GCP announced support for running chromium out-of-the-box. I thought that that would be the end of browserless.io. I held back my knee-jerk reaction to shutdown, and after a few months I believe we only lost a single customer. There's probably been a few others that we've lost along the way since the announcement, but it didn't seem to stifle our growth in any significant way. In any case it really depends on what your product or service is. Just wanted to chime-in and say that the writing isn't necessarily on the wall if this happens to you. Stay the course and offer them the much-needed competition.
- pm90 7y agoSupport is where the money is at. Every major cloud vendor has garbage support and smaller, niche companies value their customers more, especially if you're not a huge account. Also, If I'm using your service, and a competitor announces a similar service, unless they provide something that's much much cheaper, I will probably not switch.
- sdan 7y agoIs there anyway to create your own AWS/Azure/GCP on your own server?
- Redsquare 7y agoAzure has Azure Stack, you need a deep wallet https://azure.microsoft.com/en-gb/overview/azure-stack/ https://azure.microsoft.com/en-gb/overview/azure-stack/
- sdan 7y agoInteresting, because I was seriously thinking of building a product where you get a good amount of features from these cloud providers and run it on your own servers... although obviously there's going to be some drawbacks, you may save a lot of money.
- drubenstein 7y agoAWS has outpost, which is "EC2 mechanics in your own datacenter": https://aws.amazon.com/outposts/ https://aws.amazon.com/outposts/
- eb0la 7y agoGoogle has Anthos (kubernetes on prem, with access to GCP marketplace).
- taf2 7y agoSounds like a lot of free marketing! If you're well positioned and a bigger company enters your space take it for what it is they're advertising to people in your space. Sure some will just default to one of them but most will shop around and because these guys are going to be dumping money into your space - you'll see more eyes on your product. Be on your A game it'll be good for you. Maybe they'll acquire you because you do it better.
- shrimpi 7y agoThis one is easy: patents
- manigandham 7y agoUses want to pay for (managed) services, not software. The rise of AWS and cloud and downfall of on-prem licensing models over the last decade has proven this beyond any doubt. It's completely a failure of vendors to keep trying to sell software instead of competing on the services. The ones who have rolled out their own offerings are generating plenty of revenue, but the overall breadth, flexibility and quality of is still rather poor. I don't understand why these vendors are moving slowly here. They're the best at running their own software. Writing some blog posts isn't going to fix anything.
- elamje 7y agoI wonder if this is a driving force behind why Cognitect has kept Datomic closed source. I’ve seen people rally against Datomic more than once for that reason, but honestly, how can you open-source something truly unique and monetize without a large risk of cloud provider hijacking.
- dustingetz 7y agoRICH HICKEY: To those who think that Datomic ought to be open source: We don't see a viable economic model there. The source is an r/clojure flamewar which I'm not going to link.
- sammanna 7y agoThis is a good post from a16z - https://a16z.com/2019/10/04/commercializing-open-source/ https://a16z.com/2019/10/04/commercializing-open-source/ "As software has eaten the world, open source is eating software. Today, almost every major technology company, from Facebook to Google, is written on the backs of open source software. Increasingly, these companies are building their own open source projects as well – Airbnb, for example, has more than 30 open source projects, and Google more than 2000! In the future, the virtuous cycle will continue. Technologically, AI, open source data, and block chain are some examples of emerging innovations. The next generation of business models may include ad-supported OSS, as when a large proprietary enterprise supports open source projects; data-driven revenue; and crypto tokens, which monetize blockchain. I believe Open Source 3.0 will expand how we think of and define open source businesses. Open source will no longer be RedHat, Elastic, Databricks, and Cloudera; it will be – at least in part – Facebook, Airbnb, Google, and any other business that has open source as a key part of its stack. When we look at open source this way, then the renaissance underway may only be in its infancy. The market and possibilities for open source software are far greater than we have yet realized."
- known 7y agohttp://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000052.html http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000052.html can help Win Against Big Cloud