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Comment by jasonkester | Hacker News Reader

This is actually a little bit worrying as an entrepreneur building things on top of Amazon's Web Services.

Amazon has always made a point of not building services on top of its Cloud offerings that directly compete with its users. Cloud Drive sets a precedent for them as the first time they've gone against that principle.

There are lots of "low hanging fruit" companies that were built on the understanding that Amazon wasn't interested in implementing that stuff themselves. There's no debating that this will make Amazon a ton of money. It remains to be seen, however, how much it will cost them in developer loyalty and businesses that never get built because "If they did it to JungleDisk, they'll do it to us".

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This doesn't make sense. This isn't like Facebook or iOS where you are a sharecropper working their platform and they can pull the rug from under you at anytime. The platform here is the web, Amazon doesn't own the web, any company you build on the web could attract competition from anybody else. Building your business on top of Amazon's top-notch infrastructure doesn't give Amazon any advantage if they decide to compete against you. And nothing would stop you from moving off of their stuff if it did. I don't know why anyone would have the "understanding" that Amazon wasn't going to compete against them. Amazon's cloud actually evens the playing field, there's nothing stopping you from building a bookstore and competing against Amazon using their own servers against them.

In short, your complaint doesn't make sense.

The products I mention are things like Cloud Monitoring tools, Management services for your AWS instances, and other things specific to Amazon Web Services. One of my products, for example, is a service that runs detailed reports on the usage logs that Amazon generates for Cloudfront and S3. Amazon could wipe it out completely with a feature that wouldn't even make the front page here.

They've deliberately stayed away from those areas that have products in them. You're right though that this is one area where "AWS" wasn't a necessary component for the service in question. That could help explain why they're comfortable doing it.

They've deliberately stayed away from those areas that have products in them.

[citation needed]

At the scale AWS is operating I guess Amazon isn't even fully aware of all the stuff going on there. No surprise an elephant can stomp onto ants.

I've said it before, I'll say it again:

( http://swombat.com/2011/2/22/predictability-of-closed-platfo... )

> I would argue that only one thing is entirely predictable about closed platforms: they will do whatever is in the business's interest. When building your business on someone else's platform, you should always assume that if it is in the platform owner's interest, they will shut you down tomorrow with no warning.

> So, you need to do two things at the very least:

> 1. Ensure your goals and the platform owner's goals are always in harmonious agreement.

> 2. Have a backup plan for what happens if your access to the platform is revoked tomorrow.

> People seem to keep learning this lesson over and over again... with Facebook, with Twitter, and these days with Apple...

And these days, with Amazon?

I don't think that's quite comparable. Contrary to platforms like Google App Engine or iOS, the core infrastructure AWS offers is sufficiently open and commonplace that you wouldn't have such a hard time moving away from them in the unlikely event that they'll throw you out. This is simply a case of a much more classical business dilemma: a big company decides to build a product that competes with your small company. The somewhat strange thing about this case is that the big company is also providing the infrastructure for your small company so they win regardless of whichever product wins, but not at the cost of the small company's ability to build a better product.

The other side of that coin is that, if it is easy to move somewhere else, Amazon does not have that special of a product. If that is the case, how are they going to compete? Both price and quality are options, but even those are forms of lock-in, if they keep customers in-house.

Agreed. It's generally a bad idea to build your entire product around a missing feature in the Big Guy's thing.

The surprising thing about Amazon, however, is that they've gone out of their way to be the exception to that rule over the last 4 years. JungleDisk was the posterchild for "business that will only last until Amazon incorporates their product as a feature", and yet it continued to survive as Amazon released infrastructure product after infrastructure product. And in the few cases where they did move into a space where somebody had built something, they did it delicately and cooperatively. They really were the Good Guy.

I'm hoping that this was just the one space that so obviously needed filling from a Company Strategy perspective that they're making an exception in this case. They've built up a lot of goodwill. It'd be a shame to see it squandered.

JungleDisk isn't a missing feature in Amazons product, it's a full product in it's own regard, and as thus, Amazon doesn't have a clear way of shutting them down or are even in a particularly beneficial position to compete with JungleDisk.

Also, JungleDisk already competing against a whole slew of worthy competitors, some of which run on S3, some of which don't.

Which is all the more poignant because at a higher level here we have Amazon confidently building on Google's platform, in direct competition with Google's own services, knowing they can do so without prejudice.

Amongst all the argument about "open"-ness and what it means, whether it's source code or something else - for me this is the important part. If a competitor can build on a platform and safely do so in competition with the interests of the platform owner then that platform is "open" in the real sense that matters.

I would say that that the music side of things was the driver here--not to be a cloud-drive competitor. They are going to make a ton of money selling music and letting people play it from the cloud. I think the CloudDrive as a standalone storage product is more of a by-product (they needed the drive product to create the player product).

From what I calculated, it's cheaper than storing files straight in S3 (atleast at the 500G level). So their "retail" is cheaper than their "wholesale". I think it's probably not much of a profit source for them.

EDIT: "wholesale" not "hardware"

Actually, I don't believe anyone had created an Android music player that pulled songs from S3 and allowed purchase from the Amazon store. The opportunity was there, but it was not taken.

> Amazon has always made a point of not building services on top of its Cloud offerings that directly compete with its users.

This doesn't strike me as true.

Amazon CloudWatch versus CloudKick Amazon SimpleEmailService versus SendGrid Amazon RDS versus FantomDB

Frankly, looking at AWS's evolution, it seems that one of their favorite methods of innovation is to watch for startups that are servicing a lot of AWS companies, then creating their own version of that product.

Why wouldn't Amazon choose to implement one of those 'low hanging fruit' kind of features? They seem the most logical to approach first.

Because if they establish a reputation of watching what people are building on their platform, then copying it and driving those businesses out of the market, they'll alienate their developer community.

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