4 ms·

Nothing lasts forever, but it's hard not to see AWS and Amazon (thanks to Prime) as unassailable.

pulse7 5y ago
For Titanic somebody claimed that is was practically unsinkable: "God himself could not sink this ship!" ... and we know what happened...
- alangibson 5y ago
  The Dutch East India Company was worth around 6B adjusted dollars. Where are they now... Obviously Amazon is not invincible, but it's hard to imagine a scenario where they get beaten. It's going to take the ground shifting out from under them.
  - oblio 5y ago
    > The Dutch East India Company was worth around 6B adjusted dollars. Here, you dropped 3 zeroes: 6T.
    - mrfusion 5y ago
      Is that true? What happened?
      - oblio 5y ago
        > Known under the initials VOC (Vereenigde Oostindische Compagnie), the Dutch East India Company would be worth about $7.8 trillion today.
openknot 5y ago
The landscape is far from a monopoly: Costco and Wal-Mart provide strong competition for Amazon retail, and Azure is competing well with AWS too.
qqtt 5y ago
Walmart only announced their prime competitor in 2020 (Walmart+) and AWS is absolutely ripe for disruption on many fronts, including bandwidth fees. If you look around at cloud providers, it is getting to be a very crowded space (AWS, GCP, Azure, OCI, IBM, etc.) and there is no guarantee AWS will remain the go-to for the low hanging fruit web hosting use cases which can be currently handled by virtually everybody. If anything, I would point to Firebase and GCP as the tools that have driven the most innovation over the last few years, and AWS is looking more and more like a utility with a very big service cost (bandwidth) that can absolutely be disrupted.
- alangibson 5y ago
  Talk of Walmart as a main competitor only makes me more sure that no one will touch Amazon any time soon. They bought Jet.com for 3.3B in 2016 to try to compete with Amazon. Any day now, any day...
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - silisili 5y ago
    Not sure I agree. Sure, they bungled Jet... that's fair. But WM has been extremely competitive for us. AMZ went from same day to 2 day for us around COVID and never came back. WM standard delivery is 2 days and way more reliable. Moreover, if they have items in the store, they'll just bring it to you...in an hour or so. Food, clothes, games, fishing poles, medicine, you name it. That's a huuuge advantage that AMZ just doesn't have in most places. And sadly to say, WM generally has more reputable products for widget X than Amazon, which are often just 10 rebranded knockoffs of something. I keep prime and appreciate Amazon, but to say WM isn't competing is vastly underestimating the landscape. If anything, I see WM overtaking AMZ for most typical orders.
- Spivak 5y ago
  The problem with this theory is that if AWS ever faces a significant threat due to their bandwidth fees they'll probably end up lowering them even if it's at a loss for a while. I don't think AWS is at all threatened by other "kitchen sink" providers but by competitors providing better service for specific use cases. Sendgrid vs SES, Auth0 vs Cognito, SNS vs Twilio.
karmasimida 5y ago
AWS has many competitors, definitely not unassailable. For a new company to go cloud, I would be happy shopping between Azure/AWS/GCP(but not really) to get a desirable deal. Amazon however has this logistics empire built over past decade. It would remain untouchable for a long time.

For Titanic somebody claimed that is was practically unsinkable: "God himself could not sink this ship!" ... and we know what happened...

alangibson 5y ago
The Dutch East India Company was worth around 6B adjusted dollars. Where are they now... Obviously Amazon is not invincible, but it's hard to imagine a scenario where they get beaten. It's going to take the ground shifting out from under them.
- oblio 5y ago
  > The Dutch East India Company was worth around 6B adjusted dollars. Here, you dropped 3 zeroes: 6T.
  - mrfusion 5y ago
    Is that true? What happened?
    - oblio 5y ago
      > Known under the initials VOC (Vereenigde Oostindische Compagnie), the Dutch East India Company would be worth about $7.8 trillion today.

openknot 5y ago

The landscape is far from a monopoly: Costco and Wal-Mart provide strong competition for Amazon retail, and Azure is competing well with AWS too.

qqtt 5y ago

Walmart only announced their prime competitor in 2020 (Walmart+) and AWS is absolutely ripe for disruption on many fronts, including bandwidth fees. If you look around at cloud providers, it is getting to be a very crowded space (AWS, GCP, Azure, OCI, IBM, etc.) and there is no guarantee AWS will remain the go-to for the low hanging fruit web hosting use cases which can be currently handled by virtually everybody. If anything, I would point to Firebase and GCP as the tools that have driven the most innovation over the last few years, and AWS is looking more and more like a utility with a very big service cost (bandwidth) that can absolutely be disrupted.

alangibson 5y ago
Talk of Walmart as a main competitor only makes me more sure that no one will touch Amazon any time soon. They bought Jet.com for 3.3B in 2016 to try to compete with Amazon. Any day now, any day...
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- silisili 5y ago
  Not sure I agree. Sure, they bungled Jet... that's fair. But WM has been extremely competitive for us. AMZ went from same day to 2 day for us around COVID and never came back. WM standard delivery is 2 days and way more reliable. Moreover, if they have items in the store, they'll just bring it to you...in an hour or so. Food, clothes, games, fishing poles, medicine, you name it. That's a huuuge advantage that AMZ just doesn't have in most places. And sadly to say, WM generally has more reputable products for widget X than Amazon, which are often just 10 rebranded knockoffs of something. I keep prime and appreciate Amazon, but to say WM isn't competing is vastly underestimating the landscape. If anything, I see WM overtaking AMZ for most typical orders.
Spivak 5y ago
The problem with this theory is that if AWS ever faces a significant threat due to their bandwidth fees they'll probably end up lowering them even if it's at a loss for a while. I don't think AWS is at all threatened by other "kitchen sink" providers but by competitors providing better service for specific use cases. Sendgrid vs SES, Auth0 vs Cognito, SNS vs Twilio.

karmasimida 5y ago

AWS has many competitors, definitely not unassailable. For a new company to go cloud, I would be happy shopping between Azure/AWS/GCP(but not really) to get a desirable deal. Amazon however has this logistics empire built over past decade. It would remain untouchable for a long time.