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How ruthless is Amazon, really?
- bell-cot 2y agotl;dr; version of the review: Ruthless enough that they deserve to be the villain in a far-better-written-than-this-one book.
- vvpan 2y agoWell put. The title and the points made do not seem to align. It suggests that it questions the validity of Amazon's ruthlessness but it does not.
- rubberband 2y agohttps://archive.is/U1pq3 https://archive.is/U1pq3
- fucalost 2y ago[flagged]
- ctvo 2y agoYou've already burned through 100K+ (at least[1]) in start-up credits? 1. https://aws.amazon.com/startups/credits?lang=en-US https://aws.amazon.com/startups/credits?lang=en-US
- paulddraper 2y ago*1 year in credits It's common to hit the time limit before the credit limit.
- vidarh 2y agoI once had a contract where they spent a decent chunk of money for me to get them running on AWS but set up in prep to do a zero downtime migration to Google, and then to Hetzner, in order to first milk AWS and Google credits... It worked well, but the savings from moving to Hetzner were so large they could've just set things up there from day one (they had massive egress relative to compute, and at the time the reduction in egress fees vs AWS alone was more than their total cost at Hetzner)
- willsmith72 2y agothat 100k is often miscited as a figure any startup can apply for. the real number is 1k 100k has to be associated with an "Activate Provider" and a few other criteria
- gregw134 2y agoHow so? I'm building a startup now and am using aws, curious if you'd still recommend.
- hpeter 2y agoYou should avoid most of their offerings because of vendor lock-in. My two cents is to build something that could be deployed anywhere else also. Maybe you are fine staying on AWS forever but maybe you could save a lot of money by migrating somewhere else later. AWS fees could cost more than your startup makes, depending on how you build your service, who knows what the future brings. So it's better to make your deployment flexible enough that you can ditch AWS and migrate to dedicated servers easily. It's something to think about from the start.
- brunkerhart 2y agoThe answer depends on where you would like to spend your time on. If you believe your customers will be yours because yourygreat at operating poatgress datbase - do it, if your value in something else, go with AWS RDs postgress. Younwill save a ton of time in exchange of delegating database management to aws. Use this time to develop features your customera are looking for. If you would like to leave aws eventually it still be the same postgress that you can run anywhere you like
- vidarh 2y agoI love RDS, but it really does not save all that much time beyond initial setup that's trivially contracted out. A low retainer to someone who knows how to do this will be far cheaper than RDS. By all means use RDS when you can justify the cost - if it's a rounding error of your total cost base there's no point finding someone to do a proper setup. But it doesn't all that large or complex a setup before there are huge savings to make even at inflated contractor rates from having someone manage it for you. More so if you do it outside of AWS entirely, though.
- behringer 2y agoIt really depends on your needs and your staff, but 3x $50/mo servers in 3 different data centers will give you excellent uptime and performance. You could host millions of page loads a month with that.
- infecto 2y agoHow?
- fallingsquirrel 2y agoI worked at a startup that (despite my protests) had a 5-figure AWS bill, when we could have fit the whole company on a $50/mo dedicated server. Maybe you're falling into the same trap?
- gopher_space 2y agoIt feels like people think an exit plan needs to include infrastructure that supports 1M reqs a sec
- _w1tm 2y agoA startup using reserved instances seems like a bad thing to do and is the opposite of scale to demand. Unless you’re actually using all that reserved compute, in which case you just didn’t generate enough value. It happens.
- tomcar288 2y agoyou should switch to digitalocean. they're awesome for startups. i've used them for a long time and i can tell you the uptime is really good.
- wheelerwj 2y agoTaking money from someone who is handing it to you is not ruthless…
- belval 2y agoReminds me of people blaming UberEats/DoorDash for their poor financial situation. AWS sells a convenient service, if you cannot afford that service maybe just don't use it?
- TulliusCicero 2y agoHow is that ruthless? If their prices suck wouldn't you just switch to another provider?
- behringer 2y agoVendor lock in combined with sunk cost, combined with my favorite, keeping up with the joneses, aka "industry standard".
- xutopia 2y agoI don't think people are quite willing yet to fathom that Amazon and Facebook are on a rampage. Amazon copies succesful products and claims them as their own. Facebook looks at SSO authorization numbers to determine what should be the next product area to focus on. Their endgames are to take over everything, everywhere. Forums used to exist... now it's FB. Successful shoe manufacturers, bag manufacturers... decimated by Amazon's copy and paste attitude. I don't know if it's that kind of world I want to live in.
- recursive 2y ago> I don't know if it's that kind of world I want to live in. I do.
- Rexxar 2y agoThe "do" refers to "know" or "want" ?
- recursive 2y agoThe knowing. I definitely don't want to live there. I have successfully unsubscribed my household from the Prime subscription. I haven't ordered anything from them in many years. And never will again if I can help it.
- Rexxar 2y agoIndeed. Seeing the downvotes, it seems many people misunderstood your comment.
- ubiquitysc 2y agoI feel like it was Reddit who more successfully cannibalized forums.
- GuB-42 2y agoAnd Discord. It is not the same experience, but Discord servers often act as community hubs in the same way private forums did before. I seems to be eating Facebook too.
- zer00eyz 2y ago>> Marc Lore, Diapers’ founder, has not forgiven Amazon. He later went on to lead the e-commerce division of Walmart, Compare Walmart retail to Amazon retail. Who has more revenue? Im going to tell you that it isnt amazon. AWS and its 30 percent margins are the only thing propping amazon up vs Walmart. Walmart drove every small retailer out of business. They gutted America an then when there was no money they left communities with NO retail. Walmart moving out of areas creates massive food deserts in relatively urban areas. How ruthless is amazon, not as ruthless as Walmart.
- TulliusCicero 2y ago> They gutted America an then when there was no money they left communities with NO retail. Evidence of this? Because I mean, the obvious retort would seem to be, "well then the retail could come back then?" Like, destroying mom and pop shops so that you can just leave seems pointless? Is the idea that people in the community will just shop at a Wal-mart further away then?
- miek 2y agoAbout retail coming back: I wouldnt be surprised if dollar stores (dollar tree etc) took advantage of Wal-Mart's departures
- zer00eyz 2y agoBing bing bing!!! Your just a hair off the mark its dollar general. And its next level fuckery there too: https://www.businessinsider.com/dollar-general-overcharging-shoppers-at-checkout-according-state-governments-customers-2023-11 https://www.businessinsider.com/dollar-general-overcharging-...
- silverquiet 2y agoIn theory, a small general type store serving a small community could make a lot of sense. In practice however, they tend to be fairly depressing to shop in because they're just barely maintained by the one employee who's harried to stock shelves and clean between ringing up customers.
- benreesman 2y agoI’m a pretty big critic of what FAANG has become. The mix of them and lobbying makes Wall St. and lobbying look like a ballet. Outside of a few islands like FAIR, parts of MSFT (MSR still rules, and dev tooling and Azure, there’s stuff), and whatever Jeff Dean is currently doing with a blank check, I look to younger companies for technical excellence: TailScale, Anduril, a few names like that on the bigger end, but also buf and flox and Greplin and Linear and so much great seed and even pre-seed stuff. But I’m starting to doubt the utility of calling out this or that crime of the Cartel: privatizing the Labs was a bad idea. We have to roll the model back.
- blackeyeblitzar 2y agoI’m looking forward to this book, but do we really need to debate all these little issues and angles as a society? Or can we just say these companies are too big and need to be split up and face fair competition? I feel like our response is always to waste years on some small aspect in courts instead of making a meaningful broad change to antitrust law.
- vvpan 2y agoThe article is not very well written imho but I love it when conversations about free markets come up because I certainly do not understand the free market ideology. Some people really love free markets and blame regulations for their inefficiency and inequality (or just say that inequality is a normal product of efficiency). But I have never been able to see that. Accumulation of wealth on the scale of Amazon allows them to squelch any semblance of enterprise with ease which seems to defeat the original point of free enterprise. One could argue that this level of inequality is better for everybody, and it probably is for material quality of life, but is that a permanent thing and is it OK to have large chunks of our lives be at the mercy of one or two giant monopolies? EDIT: I love enterprise by the way, in case that is lost in the argument, but it seems to me like growth and enterprise are at odds with each other.
- rstuart4133 2y ago> I certainly do not understand the free market ideology. You aren't expected to understand it, you are being asked to accept it as true without questioning. If an idea can be clearly understood, say like "you need clouds to get rain" then you don't need an ideology to sustain the idea. But if you are selling "rain dances make rain", relying mere rational thinking to propel the idea into the mainstream isn't going get you very far.
- over_bridge 2y agoFree market ideology has a lot in common with religion. Ignore all data and common sense and just embrace the idea that its true. All will make sense once the goal is achieved and until then you just have to have faith. The idea that competition is the holy grail of progress is a similar situation. Cooperation is far superior. When two lions compete, both get covered in scratches and bites and they die of infection. When they work together they can hunt and raise a family. We are always expecting companies to compete when one look at an actual megacorp will show you how much effort they spend on avoiding competition. It's all mergers and acquisitions. Buy your competitors before they are a challenge and add them to your empire (cooperation). Why does every industry merge into a monopoly? Because its far easier to cooperate as a single unit than as separate entities sniping at each other The pursuit of the ideal free market forces us to adopt such unnatural beliefs and behaviors, and we have to pretend they are just fine.