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Cringely: Amazon Is Starting To Act Like 'Bad Microsoft' (cringely.com)

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the meeting-the-new-boss-same-as-the-old-boss dept.

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.

4 of 96 comments (clear)

  1. Bad Microsoft? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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".

    1. Re:Bad Microsoft? by DaHat · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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.

      --
      Help Brendan pay off his student loans
    2. Re:Bad Microsoft? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

      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.

  2. Terrible summary by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.