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I think everyone here is missing the real reason why big companies want to go with Azure (and smaller companies probably should consider too). No one trusts Am

I think everyone here is missing the real reason why big companies want to go with Azure (and smaller companies probably should consider too). No one trusts Amazon to not screw them over. The A to Z in the Amazon logo hurts AWS because big companies are worried Amazon will compete with them (if they don’t already) and will use AWS data and information against those companies. MS has a long history of being a provider of tools and not really competing with partners. Even when they did start competing (such as with the Surface line) it was done in a way that has not really hurt the partners and has probably helped them by raising the Windows brand in the premium space vis a vis a Mac.

leoc 7y ago
> MS has a long history of being a provider of tools and not really competing with partners. Windows ISVs and other OS providers excepted, of course ...
- polskibus 7y ago
  What about CRM, messaging, analytics, BI, etc.? Some time ago they released a beta (?) of invoicing product - not sure how that went.
  - thawaway1837 7y ago
    I mean, they crush competitors. Not so much partners and clients. These are all tool makers and basically competitors. And frankly for the vast majority of them they actually bought the alternatives. For example, they bought Skype for messaging, they bought Great Plains, etc.
    - DaiPlusPlus 7y ago
      They ran Skype into the ground by compromising on the quality of the end user-experience - just like they did with MSN Messenger - and the current desktop Skype client is an Electron app (at least this way Linux still gets supported...). Skype was in prime position to be the best way to have free voice and video-calls between iOS and Android phones and the wider Internet (seeming as FaceTime is Apple-exclusive and Hangouts seems unpopular) - I don’t know what happened but WhatsApp ate Skype’s lunch and got bought by FB and the rest is history. Skype on my iPhone X is just painful. I use it to make cheap PSTN calls when I’m abroad and simple things like switching to Speakerphone mode takes 2-3 seconds and involves opening the iOS audio output list (which has an animated opening for some reason) instead of every other app which has a single speaker button. This is but one example, of course. They could have bought Slack, but they competed with MS Teams instead - but doing-so awfully because they still don’t have multi-tenant support in the client. Thing is - I can’t say that competing with Microsoft has made Slack any better (case-in-point: last month’s always-on WYSIWYG editor debacle).
      - laurentb 7y ago
        It's only a personal opinion, but I find that Teams has a much better product than Slack and a much better vision of integrations than slack does.
      - valleyjo 7y ago
        Microsoft tried to buy slack but they wouldn’t sell.
      - Xixi 7y ago
        IIRC Skype peer-to-peer architecture was a very bad fit for smartphones. For instance text messages in Skype were sent directly from client to client, requiring the two PCs to be up and running at the same time for the communication to happen. It was brilliant for PCs running 10 hours a day, making Skype infrastructure very light. Now take two iOS smartphones, where Skype will only run when the user is focused on the app. The peer-to-peer link was simply not going to happen. Skype brilliant peer-to-peer architecture simply didn't work anymore. This is why Skype was so late to the party.
        DaiPlusPlus 7y ago
        Skype went from peer-to-peer to centralised right after Microsoft bought them out - this was before modern smartphones got popular - and to my knowledge the smartphone apps were always centralised.
  - DaiPlusPlus 7y ago
    Microsoft has line-of-business software titles at different market-tiers - so you could be referring to any one of them. At the low-end, Office 365 now includes web-based invoices, bookings (a la hairdresser appointments), and the like. Middle-tier would be using something from their former Great Plains titles (now under the Dynamics brand). And at the high-end, that’d be a partner-customised build of MS Dynamics. Now all they have to do is bring back Microsoft Money!
    - WorldMaker 7y ago
      > Now all they have to do is bring back Microsoft Money! They call it Excel. Which is sadly not as facetious as it sounds. Microsoft's smaller finance tools had to compete not just externally with Intuit's and Peachtree/Sage's products but internally with Excel, and Excel has long held steady somewhere in the second or third most commonly used personal and small business finance tool. (Source/disclaimer: I was a college intern for what for most of my time there was called Microsoft Small Business Accounting, briefly in my experience there was called Microsoft Office Accounting, and sadly didn't survive as a product during the time it took me to finish my degrees. IMNSHO it was a really good product, and I'm sad it never had the chance it deserved, because it sadly wasn't possible to beat Excel for market penetration, even bundled right next to Excel.)
- hinkley 7y ago
  Microsoft first got onto my shitlist radar by putting a series of application vendors out of business by making bad knockoffs and leveraging bulk sales. EE&E has its roots in those stories. With a leopard this old, it’s hard to tell if it has changed its spots or it’s just covered with old dirt. What I do know is if you get bit I don’t want to hear about it. I’ll just laugh and laugh in your face.
  - disappearance 7y ago
    You’re really bringing up EE&E in a thread comparing Microsoft & Amazon?! LOL indeed.
    - taurath 7y ago
      I’d say it’s safe to say if MS has the market dominance Amazon does now, they would absolutely be doing the same things. They used to, and would again, despite their “underdog” current PR campaign.
    - DaiPlusPlus 7y ago
      Pardon my ignorance, what is EE&E? Edit: just had a flashback to /. - is it “embrace, extend, extinguish”?
    - hinkley 7y ago
      I’m bringing up MS’ very real history of competing within its own ecosystem in a conversation about Amazon doing the same. The big three are all snakes in the grass. Don’t fool yourself about lesser evils.
AmericanChopper 7y ago
I don’t think this is true at all. I see a couple of very obvious reason that large organisations go with Azure. 1) Most large orgs already have Exchange/AD/SharePoint infrastructure. Move that into the cloud and boom, you’re already an Azure customer whether you noticed it or not. Want to take some more IaaS services on? Want a cloud SCM?... Don’t worry about procurement, you’re already a customer. 2) Procurement decisions in large organisations have to satisfy a lot of different stakeholders. A big, reputable vendor, that can solve a huge number of your problems all at once is remarkably attractive to such an organisation. Azure doesn’t have the same features as AWS, but that doesn’t matter. Most of the decision makers don’t care, and the technical teams aren’t likely to use the fancy AWS services anyhow. Forklifting their infrastructure into the cloud was a enough effort to begin with. This model is very common in enterprise software/services. Symantec and Cisco are other examples of a companies exploiting the same dynamics. Their products are mostly garbage, they go around acquiring other products, and then poorly incorporating them into their portfolio. But they have a large market share to sell new things into, and when they’re talking to their customers they can pitch “just buy all of our products, and that’s like 80% of your compliance worries solved. No need to deal with 10 vendors”.
- thawaway1837 7y ago
  I don’t disagree with #1. But #2 is not really valid IMO. In terms of cloud AWS fills the role of nobody got fired for picking IBM as opposed to Azure. Procurement decisions usually start with AWS.
  - AmericanChopper 7y ago
    > In terms of cloud AWS fills the role of nobody got fired for picking IBM as opposed to Azure. Procurement decisions usually start with AWS. This perspective isn’t shared by a lot of big companies. For most smaller, younger, technically oriented organisations, this is true. But large enterprises have a complete different set of values, priorities, and ways of doing things. The kind of organisations that are used to running huge Exchange, AD, SharePoint infrastructure often don’t see things that way, and often won’t be able to get much value out of AWS’s feature advantages over Azure anyway. Of course you’ll find examples of large enterprise that love AWS, or GCP, but having witnessed how a lot of procurement decisions play out in these kinds of organisations, it’s absolutely not surprising to me to see Azure doing well I’m this segment. Especially for organisations that have invested heavily in GPO over the decades, I think a lot of them see AD alone as a killer feature.
akudha 7y ago
will use AWS data and information against those companies. Aren't there laws to prevent this? Say I am a big retailer - target, aldi or some company at that scale using AWS. Are you saying Amazon can look into my database/code etc and learn from it and use that knowledge to compete with me? Shouldn't such a thing be illegal, though it would super hard to prove?
- mjlee 7y ago
  Even discounting that, you're still giving your biggest competitor money.
- swarnie_ 7y ago
  Aren't there laws to prevent this? Potentially yes but when have big tech ever played by the rules though. Its hard to name a single FAANG company that hasn't used terrible/outright illegal practises to get to the top.
- thawaway1837 7y ago
  They don’t need to look into your data to get valuable information. Simple stuff that shows up on your bill, such as the amount of data transfer, the sizes of your databases and how they change, etc is enough. I doubt there are laws that prevent them from doing deep dives into your data but that’s not really the concern. I don’t expect them to do that. However, when it comes to trying to solve problems, create bespoke apps, as a retailer you will probably be far more comfortable sharing the information about your data with a Microsoft rep than an AWS rep helping you build that bespoke solution.
- jeswin 7y ago
  Even metadata will be useful information and most likely not covered under laws. For example, peak load, usage patterns, spends etc.
- Joe8Bit 7y ago
  I did some strategy work for a global retailer a few years ago and this kept coming up, they even have a policy that SaaS tools they acquire "can't be hosted in AWS". Their reasoning seemed a bit paranoid, but it wasn't that Amazon would secretly start mining their data there without telling them, it's that this retailer would invest 10's (even 100's) of millions of dollars in tools and infrastructure on AWS and then AWS would change their terms and conditions to allow them to look at/share data 'legally' and the retailer would be so in the hole in terms of investment/technology they couldn't leave/stop them without losing millions. They saw it as risk mitigation. I think it's _incredibly_ unlikely this would ever happen, but if you combine that with "I don't want to give one of our biggest competitors a cent" it ends up with policies like this
elfexec 7y ago
> MS has a long history of being a provider of tools and not really competing with partners. MS claim to fame was by providing tools to a partner and directly competing with their partner. "In 1985, IBM requested Microsoft to develop a new operating system for their computers called OS/2. Microsoft produced that operating system, but also continued to sell their own alternative, which proved to be in direct competition with OS/2." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Microsoft https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Microsoft
- caspper69 7y ago
  There's so much more to the IBM/Microsoft OS/2 story than the quote you posted. In fact, there have been books written about it. I'm not sure your quote accurately captures what actually happened over those 5 or so years.
k__ 7y ago
Well, at least they can't compete with governments
jasonvorhe 7y ago
> The A to Z in the Amazon logo hurts AWS because big companies are worried Amazon will compete with them (if they don’t already) and will use AWS data and information against those companies. This always had a vibe of a conspiracy theory to me. If this were to ever happen and it came out, AWS would be screwed for all eternity. You just need one disgruntled employee to keep a screenshot of their auditing logs to make all hell break loose. I think most companies who actually consider this to be part of their threat model are full of themselves to actually think that Amazon would do this to their brand and the trust associated with it for the benefit of looking into systems that most likely don't contain information that's as interesting as company execs and engineers think. I once knew someone who forbid his employees to use Google because he said that Google would copy his ideas and that his employees would leak them if they even searched for related key words.
- laurentb 7y ago
  You don't have to look that deep to see the example. Walmart categorically refuses to buy anything that runs on Amazon simply because amazon competes with walmart directly in retail. having said that, i'm sure there are exceptions and some examples where they do have some stuff they use hosted on aws but that's the exception not the norm.
  - scarface74 7y ago
    But yet Netflix is all in on Amazon even though Amazon Prime Video exists. Apple depends on Samsung for many of its components and Google pays Apple billions a year to be the default search engine. Companies cooperate and compete with each other all the time.
    - laurentb 7y ago
      They do, and in some cases or exceptions they bypass whatever internal rule they imposed on themselves just like your examples. However, whether it's Amazon or another, it doesn't change the fact that businesses are in general averse to do business with a company that has shown in the past that it will enter a new market if it sees money in it at the cost of its partner relationship.
laurentb 7y ago
You're mistaken if you think Microsoft doesn't compete directly with its partners. If anything, they are very sneaky how they do it, every ISV knows and yet still collaborates with them. SharePoint improvements have been built and incorporated out of the box because/thanks to ISV's, Flow (now PowerAutomate) is a direct inspiration and competition from one of MS historical partners in the SharePoint space called Nintex. They absolutely compete, they absolutely steal ideas and they do so by getting their partners to willingly show them what they are working on. For any ISV worth their salt in the MS world, they know this and hopefully they have a plan for when that ultimately happens. The one thing that Microsoft keeps focusing on is IT related stuff, whether it's software or hardware, it's still in the IT realm 90% of the time. On the other hand as you pointed out yourself, Amazon does everything and doesn't think twice to enter a new market if it thinks it can aggressively compete and gain a significant market share. Similarly, both Amazon and Google do not have an engrained culture of working with partners the same way that Microsoft does, they do work with some don't get me wrong, but it's nowhere near what Microsoft does and how it behaves. It's no surprise that the Co-Sell program at Microsoft is so successful, it's pushed by the Higher ups and all the way down to the field sales people live and breathe it. Google is trying to do something similar but you can tell (if you work or have worked with both sides) that the google side doesn't care as much as Microsoft.
- BoorishBears 7y ago
  That's not what they mean, Amazon will compete with companies on non-technical grounds. You can craft artisanal hand napkins; tomorrow morning 365 Everyday launches their new premium hand napkins with free same-day shipping. So now every dollar you spend hosting your e-commerce site is directly funding your competitor, which is able to out perform you on the back of insane profits from things like... AWS
- mrits 7y ago
  This is so true. I've sat at tables in Redmond where they've managed to get their competition to take turns explaining what is and is not working for their products.
ak39 7y ago
Agreed. No one got fired for choosing IBM. No one gets fired for choosing Microsoft - still. It's about trust. Or the perception of it.
webpaymentsguy 7y ago
I'm not sure this is true? I know Azure/MS was way better with sending someone to contact my team (as well as other larger corporations I got to talk to) to figure out a type of partnership with us and determine the level of support we'd need. I don't think Amazon being a competitor is really considered for most cos, either. I don't think there's some latent distrust of AWS or that people really equate Windows being good means Azure is good - I think it's known Amazon has top tier support, really great reliability and security (like Azure), as well as seemingly the best selection. GCP for example isn't even in the running for most people even though I'd say Google is probably considered the 'brainiest' tech co. Source: talked to folks at banks, a handful of startups, and manufacturers who've gone with Azure or AWS when deciding for our biz.
jariel 7y ago
The implications of Amazon illegally sniffing data from partners to use for its retail business are apocalyptic. They are risking 1 Trillion dollars in lawsuits, for what? I don't think that this is happening in any detail, however, maybe some high level things, such as account size, configuration etc. - that information could be leaked. But some category manager at Amazon.com husting the logs from Nodrstrom on AWS ... I don't think so.

leoc 7y ago

> MS has a long history of being a provider of tools and not really competing with partners. Windows ISVs and other OS providers excepted, of course ...

polskibus 7y ago
What about CRM, messaging, analytics, BI, etc.? Some time ago they released a beta (?) of invoicing product - not sure how that went.
- thawaway1837 7y ago
  I mean, they crush competitors. Not so much partners and clients. These are all tool makers and basically competitors. And frankly for the vast majority of them they actually bought the alternatives. For example, they bought Skype for messaging, they bought Great Plains, etc.
  - DaiPlusPlus 7y ago
    They ran Skype into the ground by compromising on the quality of the end user-experience - just like they did with MSN Messenger - and the current desktop Skype client is an Electron app (at least this way Linux still gets supported...). Skype was in prime position to be the best way to have free voice and video-calls between iOS and Android phones and the wider Internet (seeming as FaceTime is Apple-exclusive and Hangouts seems unpopular) - I don’t know what happened but WhatsApp ate Skype’s lunch and got bought by FB and the rest is history. Skype on my iPhone X is just painful. I use it to make cheap PSTN calls when I’m abroad and simple things like switching to Speakerphone mode takes 2-3 seconds and involves opening the iOS audio output list (which has an animated opening for some reason) instead of every other app which has a single speaker button. This is but one example, of course. They could have bought Slack, but they competed with MS Teams instead - but doing-so awfully because they still don’t have multi-tenant support in the client. Thing is - I can’t say that competing with Microsoft has made Slack any better (case-in-point: last month’s always-on WYSIWYG editor debacle).
    - laurentb 7y ago
      It's only a personal opinion, but I find that Teams has a much better product than Slack and a much better vision of integrations than slack does.
    - valleyjo 7y ago
      Microsoft tried to buy slack but they wouldn’t sell.
    - Xixi 7y ago
      IIRC Skype peer-to-peer architecture was a very bad fit for smartphones. For instance text messages in Skype were sent directly from client to client, requiring the two PCs to be up and running at the same time for the communication to happen. It was brilliant for PCs running 10 hours a day, making Skype infrastructure very light. Now take two iOS smartphones, where Skype will only run when the user is focused on the app. The peer-to-peer link was simply not going to happen. Skype brilliant peer-to-peer architecture simply didn't work anymore. This is why Skype was so late to the party.
      - DaiPlusPlus 7y ago
        Skype went from peer-to-peer to centralised right after Microsoft bought them out - this was before modern smartphones got popular - and to my knowledge the smartphone apps were always centralised.
- DaiPlusPlus 7y ago
  Microsoft has line-of-business software titles at different market-tiers - so you could be referring to any one of them. At the low-end, Office 365 now includes web-based invoices, bookings (a la hairdresser appointments), and the like. Middle-tier would be using something from their former Great Plains titles (now under the Dynamics brand). And at the high-end, that’d be a partner-customised build of MS Dynamics. Now all they have to do is bring back Microsoft Money!
  - WorldMaker 7y ago
    > Now all they have to do is bring back Microsoft Money! They call it Excel. Which is sadly not as facetious as it sounds. Microsoft's smaller finance tools had to compete not just externally with Intuit's and Peachtree/Sage's products but internally with Excel, and Excel has long held steady somewhere in the second or third most commonly used personal and small business finance tool. (Source/disclaimer: I was a college intern for what for most of my time there was called Microsoft Small Business Accounting, briefly in my experience there was called Microsoft Office Accounting, and sadly didn't survive as a product during the time it took me to finish my degrees. IMNSHO it was a really good product, and I'm sad it never had the chance it deserved, because it sadly wasn't possible to beat Excel for market penetration, even bundled right next to Excel.)
hinkley 7y ago
Microsoft first got onto my shitlist radar by putting a series of application vendors out of business by making bad knockoffs and leveraging bulk sales. EE&E has its roots in those stories. With a leopard this old, it’s hard to tell if it has changed its spots or it’s just covered with old dirt. What I do know is if you get bit I don’t want to hear about it. I’ll just laugh and laugh in your face.
- disappearance 7y ago
  You’re really bringing up EE&E in a thread comparing Microsoft & Amazon?! LOL indeed.
  - taurath 7y ago
    I’d say it’s safe to say if MS has the market dominance Amazon does now, they would absolutely be doing the same things. They used to, and would again, despite their “underdog” current PR campaign.
  - DaiPlusPlus 7y ago
    Pardon my ignorance, what is EE&E? Edit: just had a flashback to /. - is it “embrace, extend, extinguish”?
  - hinkley 7y ago
    I’m bringing up MS’ very real history of competing within its own ecosystem in a conversation about Amazon doing the same. The big three are all snakes in the grass. Don’t fool yourself about lesser evils.

AmericanChopper 7y ago

I don’t think this is true at all. I see a couple of very obvious reason that large organisations go with Azure. 1) Most large orgs already have Exchange/AD/SharePoint infrastructure. Move that into the cloud and boom, you’re already an Azure customer whether you noticed it or not. Want to take some more IaaS services on? Want a cloud SCM?... Don’t worry about procurement, you’re already a customer. 2) Procurement decisions in large organisations have to satisfy a lot of different stakeholders. A big, reputable vendor, that can solve a huge number of your problems all at once is remarkably attractive to such an organisation. Azure doesn’t have the same features as AWS, but that doesn’t matter. Most of the decision makers don’t care, and the technical teams aren’t likely to use the fancy AWS services anyhow. Forklifting their infrastructure into the cloud was a enough effort to begin with. This model is very common in enterprise software/services. Symantec and Cisco are other examples of a companies exploiting the same dynamics. Their products are mostly garbage, they go around acquiring other products, and then poorly incorporating them into their portfolio. But they have a large market share to sell new things into, and when they’re talking to their customers they can pitch “just buy all of our products, and that’s like 80% of your compliance worries solved. No need to deal with 10 vendors”.

thawaway1837 7y ago
I don’t disagree with #1. But #2 is not really valid IMO. In terms of cloud AWS fills the role of nobody got fired for picking IBM as opposed to Azure. Procurement decisions usually start with AWS.
- AmericanChopper 7y ago
  > In terms of cloud AWS fills the role of nobody got fired for picking IBM as opposed to Azure. Procurement decisions usually start with AWS. This perspective isn’t shared by a lot of big companies. For most smaller, younger, technically oriented organisations, this is true. But large enterprises have a complete different set of values, priorities, and ways of doing things. The kind of organisations that are used to running huge Exchange, AD, SharePoint infrastructure often don’t see things that way, and often won’t be able to get much value out of AWS’s feature advantages over Azure anyway. Of course you’ll find examples of large enterprise that love AWS, or GCP, but having witnessed how a lot of procurement decisions play out in these kinds of organisations, it’s absolutely not surprising to me to see Azure doing well I’m this segment. Especially for organisations that have invested heavily in GPO over the decades, I think a lot of them see AD alone as a killer feature.

akudha 7y ago

will use AWS data and information against those companies. Aren't there laws to prevent this? Say I am a big retailer - target, aldi or some company at that scale using AWS. Are you saying Amazon can look into my database/code etc and learn from it and use that knowledge to compete with me? Shouldn't such a thing be illegal, though it would super hard to prove?

mjlee 7y ago
Even discounting that, you're still giving your biggest competitor money.
swarnie_ 7y ago
Aren't there laws to prevent this? Potentially yes but when have big tech ever played by the rules though. Its hard to name a single FAANG company that hasn't used terrible/outright illegal practises to get to the top.
thawaway1837 7y ago
They don’t need to look into your data to get valuable information. Simple stuff that shows up on your bill, such as the amount of data transfer, the sizes of your databases and how they change, etc is enough. I doubt there are laws that prevent them from doing deep dives into your data but that’s not really the concern. I don’t expect them to do that. However, when it comes to trying to solve problems, create bespoke apps, as a retailer you will probably be far more comfortable sharing the information about your data with a Microsoft rep than an AWS rep helping you build that bespoke solution.
jeswin 7y ago
Even metadata will be useful information and most likely not covered under laws. For example, peak load, usage patterns, spends etc.
Joe8Bit 7y ago
I did some strategy work for a global retailer a few years ago and this kept coming up, they even have a policy that SaaS tools they acquire "can't be hosted in AWS". Their reasoning seemed a bit paranoid, but it wasn't that Amazon would secretly start mining their data there without telling them, it's that this retailer would invest 10's (even 100's) of millions of dollars in tools and infrastructure on AWS and then AWS would change their terms and conditions to allow them to look at/share data 'legally' and the retailer would be so in the hole in terms of investment/technology they couldn't leave/stop them without losing millions. They saw it as risk mitigation. I think it's _incredibly_ unlikely this would ever happen, but if you combine that with "I don't want to give one of our biggest competitors a cent" it ends up with policies like this

elfexec 7y ago

> MS has a long history of being a provider of tools and not really competing with partners. MS claim to fame was by providing tools to a partner and directly competing with their partner. "In 1985, IBM requested Microsoft to develop a new operating system for their computers called OS/2. Microsoft produced that operating system, but also continued to sell their own alternative, which proved to be in direct competition with OS/2." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Microsoft https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Microsoft

caspper69 7y ago
There's so much more to the IBM/Microsoft OS/2 story than the quote you posted. In fact, there have been books written about it. I'm not sure your quote accurately captures what actually happened over those 5 or so years.

k__ 7y ago

Well, at least they can't compete with governments

jasonvorhe 7y ago

> The A to Z in the Amazon logo hurts AWS because big companies are worried Amazon will compete with them (if they don’t already) and will use AWS data and information against those companies. This always had a vibe of a conspiracy theory to me. If this were to ever happen and it came out, AWS would be screwed for all eternity. You just need one disgruntled employee to keep a screenshot of their auditing logs to make all hell break loose. I think most companies who actually consider this to be part of their threat model are full of themselves to actually think that Amazon would do this to their brand and the trust associated with it for the benefit of looking into systems that most likely don't contain information that's as interesting as company execs and engineers think. I once knew someone who forbid his employees to use Google because he said that Google would copy his ideas and that his employees would leak them if they even searched for related key words.

laurentb 7y ago
You don't have to look that deep to see the example. Walmart categorically refuses to buy anything that runs on Amazon simply because amazon competes with walmart directly in retail. having said that, i'm sure there are exceptions and some examples where they do have some stuff they use hosted on aws but that's the exception not the norm.
- scarface74 7y ago
  But yet Netflix is all in on Amazon even though Amazon Prime Video exists. Apple depends on Samsung for many of its components and Google pays Apple billions a year to be the default search engine. Companies cooperate and compete with each other all the time.
  - laurentb 7y ago
    They do, and in some cases or exceptions they bypass whatever internal rule they imposed on themselves just like your examples. However, whether it's Amazon or another, it doesn't change the fact that businesses are in general averse to do business with a company that has shown in the past that it will enter a new market if it sees money in it at the cost of its partner relationship.

laurentb 7y ago

You're mistaken if you think Microsoft doesn't compete directly with its partners. If anything, they are very sneaky how they do it, every ISV knows and yet still collaborates with them. SharePoint improvements have been built and incorporated out of the box because/thanks to ISV's, Flow (now PowerAutomate) is a direct inspiration and competition from one of MS historical partners in the SharePoint space called Nintex. They absolutely compete, they absolutely steal ideas and they do so by getting their partners to willingly show them what they are working on. For any ISV worth their salt in the MS world, they know this and hopefully they have a plan for when that ultimately happens. The one thing that Microsoft keeps focusing on is IT related stuff, whether it's software or hardware, it's still in the IT realm 90% of the time. On the other hand as you pointed out yourself, Amazon does everything and doesn't think twice to enter a new market if it thinks it can aggressively compete and gain a significant market share. Similarly, both Amazon and Google do not have an engrained culture of working with partners the same way that Microsoft does, they do work with some don't get me wrong, but it's nowhere near what Microsoft does and how it behaves. It's no surprise that the Co-Sell program at Microsoft is so successful, it's pushed by the Higher ups and all the way down to the field sales people live and breathe it. Google is trying to do something similar but you can tell (if you work or have worked with both sides) that the google side doesn't care as much as Microsoft.

BoorishBears 7y ago
That's not what they mean, Amazon will compete with companies on non-technical grounds. You can craft artisanal hand napkins; tomorrow morning 365 Everyday launches their new premium hand napkins with free same-day shipping. So now every dollar you spend hosting your e-commerce site is directly funding your competitor, which is able to out perform you on the back of insane profits from things like... AWS
mrits 7y ago
This is so true. I've sat at tables in Redmond where they've managed to get their competition to take turns explaining what is and is not working for their products.

ak39 7y ago

Agreed. No one got fired for choosing IBM. No one gets fired for choosing Microsoft - still. It's about trust. Or the perception of it.

webpaymentsguy 7y ago

I'm not sure this is true? I know Azure/MS was way better with sending someone to contact my team (as well as other larger corporations I got to talk to) to figure out a type of partnership with us and determine the level of support we'd need. I don't think Amazon being a competitor is really considered for most cos, either. I don't think there's some latent distrust of AWS or that people really equate Windows being good means Azure is good - I think it's known Amazon has top tier support, really great reliability and security (like Azure), as well as seemingly the best selection. GCP for example isn't even in the running for most people even though I'd say Google is probably considered the 'brainiest' tech co. Source: talked to folks at banks, a handful of startups, and manufacturers who've gone with Azure or AWS when deciding for our biz.

jariel 7y ago

The implications of Amazon illegally sniffing data from partners to use for its retail business are apocalyptic. They are risking 1 Trillion dollars in lawsuits, for what? I don't think that this is happening in any detail, however, maybe some high level things, such as account size, configuration etc. - that information could be leaked. But some category manager at Amazon.com husting the logs from Nodrstrom on AWS ... I don't think so.