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

Bad Microsoft?

[Anonymous Coward]

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".

Re:Bad Microsoft?

[Z00L00K]

Any major company is getting worse and worse these days, the world is really going the Max Headroom way.

Re:Bad Microsoft?

[ShanghaiBill]

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.

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.

Re:Bad Microsoft?

[Anonymous Coward]

rubbish, AWS is a massive proprietary lock in since the mainframe. You can't take your Lamda function with you, you are re-writing your application. You spend north of a million a month with AWS and they aren't going to help you, they have you by the short and curlies, good luck getting off it.

This is largely right. The irony is that the technologies behind this have been developed 100% by FOSS developers, however they just lead to their users being completely controlled by Amazon. Similar things happen with PostgreSQL. At small scale it's easy to migrate in and out of Amazon. At large scale you will find that RedShift will often be the solution that's selected and moving back to a PostgreSQL solution will get to be really difficult. There is no chance Amazon will every contribute back their changes.

It's a perfect example of the risks of using unprotected licenses like the GPLv2 which don't make cloud services share their code. Since seeing this I always choose the AGPL or AGPLv3.

Hey Cringely

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Terrible summary

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Not like Microsoft

[Anonymous Coward]

"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".

Re:Not like Microsoft

[mnemotronic]

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.

Supporting legacy is a pain but helps with customer retention which, in turn, makes the sales guys happy and adds to the bottom line. It can have unintended consequences as "old API think" can interfere with "the new way of doing things". In an attempt to support old and new, a product can become contorted, like someone with a bad knee who can't afford a replacement or doesn't want surgery. They learn to walk funny to relieve the knee pain and, as a result, develop hip, spine and neck problems.

Any input on this paragraph from the article:

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 ounder. 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.

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:lol at the link to the old cringely interview

[Reverend Green]

Yet here you are....

Hah!

[Halster]

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.

Re:Not like Microsoft

[TheRaven64]

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.

So, exactly like Microsoft in the mid '90s then? Remember Windows 95, which would detect SimCity binaries and defer returning memory to the OS when running them so that a use-after-free bug that worked fine in DOS didn't crash in Windows 95? Or any of the other few hundred hacks that they had? Or the security nightmare of Windows XP that came from relaxing the Windows NT security policies to avoid breaking code written for Windows 95? I'd be hard pressed to think of a company that's invested more than Microsoft in avoiding breaking third-party code. None of this was for altruistic reasons - legacy Win16 and then Win32 applications were what kept people buying Windows. Break them, and porting them or rewriting them to work on new Windows suddenly becomes a thing that businesses evaluate alongside porting them to another OS (or turning them into web apps).

Don't bet on it

[nehumanuscrede]

"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.