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Comment by echelon | Hacker News Reader

It's hard to blame them when Amazon is eating their lunch.

Well, it's more like they made a sandwich, Amazon stole it, and now Amazon is selling it to other people. Meanwhile Elastic.co is starving.

It's not a fair game anymore.

I hope the DOJ breaks them up into three or more companies.

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I don't understand this argument. It's weird enough to me when folks say "steal" in the context of copyright, but in the context of FLOSS software, it seems wholly inappropriate. Third-party hosting of open source is the norm, not the exception, in my experience.

The antitrust argument seems orthogonal: lots of small companies make money hosting FLOSS software (Bitnami[0] comes to mind, but so do other hosting companies like Dreamhost). I just searched "elasticsearch hosting" on DDG[1], and Elastic is the 5th result, behind four companies I've never heard of. In many ways, that's exactly what makes FLOSS so attractive to me: if one provider isn't suitable, I can switch. I was very grateful for this in 2013 when I had a huge issue with a change in how LShift was hosting RabbitMQ, and I was able to move my company's cluster over to CloudAMQP instead. I had a similar issue with Elastic in 2016: they didn't offer compute-heavy nodes, but our application was compute heavy (geohashing-intensive for the majority of queries). I discussed with the Elastic sales team, and they said they had no timeline for this, so we migrated the company to AWS ElasticSearch.

So I guess I'm not sure how things are improved if Amazon is broken up...even if AWS had to stand on its own, this seems like it would remain a proven business strategy that customers value and is used across the industry.

[0]: https://bitnami.com/stack/elasticsearch [1]: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=elasticsearch+hosting

This is a false narrative. Both Elastic and Amazon are making a killing.

> Elastic (NYSE: ESTC) ("Elastic"), the company behind Elasticsearch and the Elastic Stack, announced strong results for its fourth quarter and full fiscal year (ended April 30, 2021). Total revenue was $177.6 million, an increase of 44% year-over-year, or 39% on a constant currency basis.

Revenue only tells us how much business they conducted, not how much of a "killing" they made. Profits is what would tell you that, which I guarentee are going to be far less than their $177.6 million in revenue.

You don't have to guess: they're a public company.

https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/ESTC/financials?p=ESTC

Look for Normalized EBITDA. It's -121! A negative number isn't really killing it. Unless your growth number is poppin!

Is that true? Let's examine this claim a bit more closely. Net profit margin for the quarter -24.38%, net income for the quarter -43.3M, sales growth slowing by double-digit percent every year since 2018.

It's possible to take in a ton of money and still lose money.

I'm gonna go out on a limb and say if they're losing money with $177 million in revenue it's because they're expanding quickly, made a bunch of acquisitions, etc... No way they're losing money on operations.

Edit - just looked it up, they have free cash flow for the year and a $400 million cash position. Tons of deferred revenue too.

It is interesting, because Amazon used to claim [1] others would be doing to them exactly what they are doing to others today.

[1] My Conversation with Jeff Bezos (2000) - https://web.archive.org/web/20040215160333/http://www.oreill...

They made an open sandwich recipe with help of common folks. Some were making at home but lot were buying from them as it is a complex sandwich to make. Starbuck started selling same sandwich because it wwas getting popular. Good for customers they have two competing vendors for it now. But ES is unhappy because the multi billion valuation is justified only if they are a monopoly.

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