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Cringely: Amazon Is Starting To Act Like 'Bad Microsoft' (cringely.com)
An anonymous reader quotes Cringely.com:
My last column was about the recent tipping point signifying that cloud computing is guaranteed to replace personal computing over the next three years. This column is about the slugfest to determine what company's public cloud is most likely to prevail. I reckon it is Amazon's and I'll go further to claim that Amazon will shortly be the new Microsoft. What I mean by The New Microsoft is that Amazon is starting to act a lot like the old Microsoft of the 1990s. You remember -- the Bad Microsoft...
Tech companies behave this way because most employees are young and haven't worked anywhere else and because the behavior reflects the character of the founder. If the boss tells you to beat up customers and partners and it's your first job out of college, then you beat up customers and partners because that's the only world you know. At Microsoft this approach was driven by Bill Gates's belief that dominance could be lost in a single product cycle leaving no room for playing nice. At Amazon, Jeff Bezos is a believer in moving fast, making quick decisions and never looking back. The market has long rewarded this audacity so Amazon will continue to play hard until -- like Microsoft in the 90s -- they are punished for it.
Cringely points out most startups are already usings AWS -- and so are all 17 US intelligence agencies ("taking 350,000 PCs out of places like the CIA.")
Bonus link: 17 years ago Cringely answered questions from Slashdot readers.
Tech companies behave this way because most employees are young and haven't worked anywhere else and because the behavior reflects the character of the founder. If the boss tells you to beat up customers and partners and it's your first job out of college, then you beat up customers and partners because that's the only world you know. At Microsoft this approach was driven by Bill Gates's belief that dominance could be lost in a single product cycle leaving no room for playing nice. At Amazon, Jeff Bezos is a believer in moving fast, making quick decisions and never looking back. The market has long rewarded this audacity so Amazon will continue to play hard until -- like Microsoft in the 90s -- they are punished for it.
Cringely points out most startups are already usings AWS -- and so are all 17 US intelligence agencies ("taking 350,000 PCs out of places like the CIA.")
Bonus link: 17 years ago Cringely answered questions from Slashdot readers.
Microsoft is still as bad as they have ever been, they've just donned a new dress and decided to be a bit smarter about it. Amazon otoh, might become "worse Microsoft".
Will fail and be quickly pushed by underhanded means to Amazon 10.
Amazon 10 will be miserable instead of outright infuriating.
This will be spun as "Winning" by Amazon.
All of the Five (Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, Google, Facebook) are busy acting like the '90s Microsoft. That's because that's how the big money is made, right? Big money means big earnings, lots of customers and press coverage, big salaries, more head count (or keeping the count you have), fancy offices and fancy perks, well-attended conferences with plentiful speaking slots for your stars.
All of their competitors (with the exception of Red Hat, and maybe a couple others I can't think of at the moment) would be doing the same, if they could.
Cloud computing isn't replacing personal computing. That's idiocy. Sure, some people will make more use of cloud apps, but personal computing is still alive and well.
The summary also doesn't provide any details about how Amazon is actually behaving in a harmful manner. It's not at all clear to me that Amazon is actually behaving badly, or that they're more evil than, say, Microsoft Azure.
Write a better summary. This one is garbage.
I work at Amazon at AWS. One of our main principles is customer obsession - we try REALLY hard not to break any customers' workflows. Sometimes it means supporting awkward API features misconceived more than 10 years ago.
For big customers we also try to bend over backwards to accommodate them. "Pain to deal'? Hardly. There's a reason why CIA has chosen Amazon over IBM.
Amazon is doing a great job and the marketplace has rewarded it by making it #1 in multiple areas
Wake me when that changes
And he was right. Microsoft overlooked smartphones until it was too late.
back 17 years ago when slashdot was actually relevant
I thought running Microsoft software was the main purpose of Microsoft's cloud.
Thought Amazon's cloud was more a generic compute thing for whatever software
"I cannot accept your canon that we are to judge Pope and King unlike other men, with a favourable presumption that they did no wrong. If there is any presumption it is the other way against holders of power, increasing as the power increases. Historic responsibility has to make up for the want of legal responsibility. Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men, even when they exercise influence and not authority: still more when you superadd the tendency or the certainty of corruption by authority. There is no worse heresy than that the office sanctifies the holder of it".
- Lord Acton (Letter to Bishop Creighton, 1887)
Lord Acton was one of the good guys. He corresponded briefly with General Robert E. Lee, so I suppose any statues to him must be torn down. Nevertheless, he enunciated one of the great and eternal truths about politics.
I am sure that there are many other solipsists out there.
He says AWS is a pain to deal with. He doesn’t offer a single example or link or comparison to back that up. The whole thing is XYZ commentator says XYZ new company reminds him of XYZ old company. Ok, thanks for that, but I can't really use that information because it isn't really information at all.
And he was right. Microsoft overlooked smartphones until it was too late.
Not really. They were one of the first sellers of Smartphones, with Windows CE 3.0 based "Pocket PC 2002" released in 2001. Them and Palm based devices were the first real crack at smart phones.
They just sucked at making them. But they would try, try, try again. Yet Google/Android, and Apple/iPhone were able to go from 0% market-share of smartphones, to basically the entire market-share.
So then they tried again, trying to make Windows 8 an aborted merging of Desktop with touch, even though mobile and desktop couldn't share the same apps without a recompile, and people didn't buy their phones, so they just pissed off their desktop users.
This is THE most weak premise for an article I've seen in a long time. Calling it clickbait is too good.
In the 90's Microsoft was dominant because it was the main platform for OSes on devices, because it had tie-ins with it's other products, because device makers had nowhere else to go, and because although it's software was not the greatest it was where all the development was happening.
Google is the new Microsoft, not Amazon.
"How much truth can advertising buy?" - iNsuRge - AK47
FTFY.
Cringely points out most startups are already usings AWS
Is this actually true? Where does he get this info?
If you post as Anonymous Coward, don't expect a reply.
Yeah, and if Windows failed to provide a good service, customers could have gone elsewhere without much trouble.
There was macOS, there was OS/2, there was Linux, and probably more, depending on the time we're talking about.
Yet they didn't!
People could also use use some of the many other social networks. But they use Facebook.
That is the point here. People always imply the idealistic magical "free market". But in reality, every for-profit corporation is working their asses off to prevent the market from being free. If necessary via having their lobbyists be the politicians, so that when they do evil, they can have everyone blame the one instance that, if healthy, is the instance of the people: The government.
"If it's good enough for the CIA it's good enough for you." Now if that doesn't close the deal nothing will.
This has not always been the case. It went like this:
* As humanity grew, communities got far more people than Dunbar's number, and then even society even got far more communities than Dunbar's number.
* As a direct result, people can't see other people, or even whole communities, as separate entities anymore.
* This is equivalent to anonymization. The individual cannot be recognized anymore. One can't see the tree in the forest. One can't even see the forest in the forests..
* But anonymity means, that one can't track the (good/bad) behavior of individuals. Somebody can be a total dick, and then dive into the mass, and come out with neutral trustworthiness again.
* This gave a strategic advantage to psychopaths, who have no problem abusing this quirk.
Obviously, the psychopaths who were interested in power, then got into all the places of power.
The only solutions I see, is to either make communities the size of tribal villages again. In the small villages I know, at least in my country, this still works quite well. A mayor or boss can't be a dick for long, when he has to face everyone on the street each day, or even risk getting his ass kicked and throw out. ... You might think this is crazy, but this is already mostly the case in big communities. Especially on the Internet! I mean subreddits are basically groupthinking swarm animals. And ideologies/memes/-isms can also be seen as such swarm lifeforms. With all the patterns, like survival, growth, reproduction, resource processing, and even social behavior with other ideologies/memes/-isms.
Or... the other solution is, to do it like cells: Form a body, and lose one's individuality. Or at least become a swarm animal.
Frankly, as I strongly prefer the former kind. Since the latter acts so much dumber, at least from my point of view. It may still be the one winning, sadly. ...
We'll see... Most of the bio-mass on this planet is still independent (aka single-celled). But I would like the bacterial that can get to the moon...
Maybe there's a sane fusion of both... a kind of healthy fractal structure of society
"cloud computing is guaranteed to replace personal computing over the next three years"
First: I don't trust the cloud. Until the CEO's are held accountable for data breaches ( eg jail time ) then I will not be trusting my day to day data with any cloud provider.
Second: The US of A is going to have to make some serious improvements in broadband ( I would say at least 100Mbps symmetrical with no data caps ) before this can even become something more than wishful thinking.
Third: My local system will continue to work just fine offline. ISP goes down, or has some crazy troubles, I can still get work done. Not so well if everything I need is online somewhere. I deal with this already on a smaller scale via the VPN I use to connect to the corporate network. My ISP goes stupid, I may as well drive into the office or bust out the smartphone and fire up a tether. Otherwise, no work gets done.
The mega-ISP's certainly aren't going to go along with this without being forced so the whole idea of " replacing desktop computing with a cloud based one " is laughable given the current environment.
The homeless camps in and around Seattle are starting to lose their appellation as "Nickelsville", after former Seattle mayor Greg Nickles, and are starting to be known as "AmazonTown." Fitting.
Seriously? I'll stick with the bad Microsoft/Windows 7-XP-2000
Even a broken clock is right twice a day, but cringley is wrong all the time. I have no idea how thatâ(TM)s even possible. Itâ(TM)s like getting a fat zero on the SAT.
1990's microsoft: every major release was better than the last.
2010's microsoft: every major release seems to fuck you more than the last and they don't give a damn and are just making it worse to be different.
No the didn't just suck at making them. They also sucked at supporting them. Time after time, they would fail to support users of existing defective product by introducing a new and even more defective product.
Also, where the PC enabled you to switch to Linux or BSD, when you discovered Windows didn't work properly, and can't be upgraded to a newer version (assuming that might work - big assumption) you can't switch to Lineageos or any other OS on your WInphone. Hell, if you buy a device on ebay with Chinese WinCE embedded in it, you can't even switch to the English version. I have perfectly good WinCE 5.0 device. Can I run NetBSD on it? No. Its like an Apple walled garden, but without the garden, just the wall. It may be old, but my laptop is older and running Linux fine.
There is a huge mass of totally fucked Winphone users who know just how badly MS suck and making AND SUPPORTING phones. No wonder they could not screw people one more time.
Sent from my ASR33 using ASCII
Fuck, yeah. And Microsoft is cashing in on every copy of Android out there *without doing anything for Android users*.
No. Microsoft is as bad as ever, just its CEO has learnt to display a "peace" sign. That's marketing, nothing else.
Just because the thugs learn to wear a suit they don't stop being thugs.
Now don't get me started on Google...
(and yes, agree 100% on Amazon)
the old Microsoft of the 1990s. You remember -- the Bad Microsoft...
I remember that very clearly. Feels like it was only a year ago or so. Suddenly everyone was complaining that their computer had been upgraded to Windows 10 behind their backs. From one day to the next, Microsoft went from being the company that used to be popular to being the distributor of the most infectious malware outbreak in history.
Is it really that long ago? The 1990'es sounds more like the time when people actually liked Microsoft.
AWS is certainly dominant, but it is clear that Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform are very serious competitors, especially if you want to build container-based hybrid cloud solutions instead of being locked-in to some of the AWS advanced messaging/DB/serverless solutions. The competition is fierce and AWS appears to be working hard to do what it has to do for customers to get their business.
Bill Gates was certainly no warm and fuzzy, nice guy but, he at least had an altruistic vision that drove him.
Jeff Bezos is just another greedy sociopath. He should have founded Amazon in Silicon Valley where he'd have a fresh supply of budding young sociopaths to fill the ranks.
I can't go in to specific's but our experience with MSFT Azure suggests MSFT still hasn't learned their lesson. They are still 'bad MSFT' where by that I mean they don't care about their customers or customer service, they only care about how much money they can extract for the least amount of work.
I don't.
That was my point.
But I guess it's futile to use arguments to attack somebody's religion.