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Comment by codingslave | Hacker News Reader

"In business as in life, change is constant and unpredictable. When building the platforms to power your organization, you can’t be limited by yesterday’s technology decisions. Nor can the systems you create today constrain your ability to act tomorrow. In times of uncertainty, you need an architecture that gives you the agility and flexibility you need to help you weather change—or even take advantage of it."

Who are they marketing to??? I feel like I stumbled onto a well written blog aimed at SEO.

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When I read copy like this, I feel they might as well have just said:

"You didn't know you needed it, but this product is for you. It will make your work better. Your life better. You'll probably get a raise. And, while we're not allowed to say this ::whisper:: it will make you more attractive." <button>Buy Now Sight Unseen</button>

CTOs and CIOs of non-technology companies with IT departments, departments which have a bunch of legacy stuff they're just getting around to deciding how to deprecate/replace.

That's the target customer for a lot of the stuff the major cloud providers do, actually. It's the whole focus of IBM's cloud hosting (Softlayer.) It's a majority of what Azure does. Even on AWS, look at any services that aren't pure automagic-IT-for-devs services, but are instead e.g. data-science services (Redshift), or pure ops services (AWS Storage Gateway), or even "IT for non-developers" services (AWS WorkSpaces!), and you'll see the same "CTO-ese."

Any IT service that isn't grown through groundswell support by devs, is grown by top-down partner-choice by a CTO.

Maybe but I really dont think AWS comes off this way. To me, AWS seems like this massive complex system with a million overlapping services that engineers like. What if cloud adoption is bottom up and not top down?

AWS is sold bottom-up so Google/Oracle/IBM/Cisco/etc. are focusing on the top-down "let's force-feed steaks and strippers to the CIO until he signs" channel. Ultimately some companies buy one way and some buy the other but they will all adopt cloud.

AWS business is still mostly megacorps buying EC2 farms for hosting regular-ish IT apps, it's not startup or Eng driven although obviously a lot of services are there to bring them in.

It feels like a marketer trying to use what they learned in school to sell a programmer a framework. If you replace "architecture" with "vehicle" it could be a car commercial. You build up this idea of a person, then the person reading feels if they bought the item, they could be that person. In this case someone who's not "limited by yesterday's technology decisions".

Whoever it is sure ain't a good marketer. They really don't know who they're marketing to - some people respond really negatively to this type of copy.

They aren't selling to individual programmers, they're selling to CTOs and other executives, the people who have the power to make spending decisions on which cloud solution to use.

"Whoever it is sure ain't a good marketer. They really don't know who they're marketing to"

Or maybe they are a good marketer, and you're the one who doesn't know who they're marketing to? I am not in marketing, but products with ad copy that doesn't entice me at all make billions of dollars.

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