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.

Comments

Compulsory Lord Acton quotation

[Archtech]

"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.

Re:Bad Microsoft?

[DaHat]

If Amazon fails to provide good service at a fair price, their customers can go elsewhere without much trouble.

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.