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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
Microsoft was bad because they abused their dominance. Today, more people run Android than Windows, and Microsoft's dominance is fading. They may still be evil at heart, but they have less leverage to cause harm.
Comparing Amazon to the old Microsoft is silly. Cloud services are not like OSes and office suites. If Amazon fails to provide good service at a fair price, their customers can go elsewhere without much trouble.
"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."
You literally just described Microsoft, right after saying "Not like Microsoft".
"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.
Can... but at what cost? Back in the days of Microsoft's dominance, companies could pick up and leave Windows... porting all of their software to *some random platform*, and paying oodles to their vendors to do the same.
How likely is that?
The dirty little secret of many cloud services is they are sticky... deliberately so.
You could port the custom _____ system your company made targeting AWS to Azure or something else... however unless the system was architected deliberately from the beginning with the idea of portability (which most cloud services are not).
Even if the platform is easy to re-target, the underlying data may not be.
I've been involved in projects where it was known up front that once customers have a few petabytes in one particular cloud, they were less incentivized to move.
Help Brendan pay off his student loans
Yet here you are....
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
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.
"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.