
Amazon Is Becoming the New Microsoft - evo_9
http://www.cringely.com/2017/11/17/15468/
======
maltalex
In 2001, just 16 years ago, Microsoft was almost broken up because Internet
Explorer was shipped with Windows. Think about that for a second, I'll wait.

Seems like small potatoes today, doesn't it?

When was the last time you've heard of anti trust litigation because iPhones
come with Safari or a whole bunch of Apple services? What about Google and its
software on any and all Android phones? And why can Amazon tie Kindle to _its_
book store and not get sued by competitors?

We are allowing these companies to integrate vertically to the point of
insanity.

~~~
mikestew
_Seems like small potatoes today, doesn 't it?_

When one takes at face value the extremely simplistic way you stated it, yes,
it seems small. But that's not what happened. Microsoft was convicted of using
their monopoly position in operating systems to extend their reach into web
browsers. Practically speaking, the only consumer operating systems at the
time ran on personal computers, either desktops or laptops, and in that market
Microsoft held an overwhelming market share. There were no mass market
smartphones (there was WinCE, but few I knew had them), Palm Pilots held the
PDA market for a short while, but all a drop in the bucket compared to full-
blown OSs.

 _When was the last time you 've heard of anti trust litigation because
iPhones come with Safari or a whole bunch of Apple services?_

Go buy a turnkey Android phone if you don't like it.

 _What about Google and its software on any and all Android phones?_

Go buy an iPhone if you don't like that.

 _And why can Amazon tie Kindle to its book store and not get sued by
competitors?_

Apple's iBooks has about everything you'll find on Amazon. Haven't used it,
but I'd be surprised if Google Books wasn't close enough.

What were you going to buy computer-wise in 2001? A desktop or laptop that
came with Microsoft Windows whether you wanted it or not. _That_ was your
practical choice, and the courts found that though it was fine for Microsoft
to own the OS market, it was _not_ fine to leverage that into driving Netscape
out of business.

~~~
Fnoord
> Go buy an iPhone if you don't like that.

Or use LineageOS + microG [1]

> What were you going to buy computer-wise in 2001? A desktop or laptop that
> came with Microsoft Windows whether you wanted it or not. That was your
> practical choice, and the courts found that though it was fine for Microsoft
> to own the OS market, it was not fine to leverage that into driving Netscape
> out of business.

Yep, not only that, Microsoft insisted a computer should come preinstalled
with an OS (an anti-piracy argument IIRC). So eventually, some vendors
included FreeDOS. Also, if you wanted to run something else like Linux on a
computer it would cost you serious work. An example is "winmodem", an onboard
software modem instead of a traditional dedicated 'hardware' modem. Or WiFi
drivers which wouldn't work because the drivers were closed source.

The main alternative was building your own computer. That's not feasible with
a laptop though.

Also I recommend people not just look at only SCO but the whole Halloween
documents (and do realise even those are a summary). For example, have a peak
at one of the earlier Halloween documents which described how Netscape was
driven out of business.

[1] [https://lineage.microg.org/](https://lineage.microg.org/)

[2]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halloween_documents](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halloween_documents)

~~~
jgh
> Or use LineageOS + microG [1]

Eh, that's like arguing that Linux was a viable alternative for the everyday
consumer during the Microsoft days. While you _could_ do that in a practical
sense most people don't have the know-how (as you mentioned in your reply).

------
whatyoucantsay
Much of Microsoft's historical behaviour was objectionable. Amazon, however,
has been troubling on a much deeper level from the beginning.

Their attitude towards labour has been nothing short of Dickensian. I'm not
speaking so much of their habit of writing dystopian employment contracts and
turning to legal intimidation when employees leave, though that is also a
problem, as I am of their treatment of lower paid staff. Refusing dock workers
adequate rest, hydration or cooling is indefensible.

However impressive the accomplishments and intellect of Mr. Bezos may be, we
can no longer hold any faith he or Amazon will bow to even minimal concerns of
human decency. The only levers are the threat of financial and regulatory
consequences. The further Amazon's power places them beyond such levers the
more dangerous they become.

[https://www.salon.com/2014/02/23/worse_than_wal_mart_amazons...](https://www.salon.com/2014/02/23/worse_than_wal_mart_amazons_sick_brutality_and_secret_history_of_ruthlessly_intimidating_workers/)

> _The series revealed the lengths Amazon was prepared to go to keep costs
> down and output high and yielded a singular image of Amazon’s
> ruthlessness—ambulances stationed on hot days at the Amazon center to take
> employees suffering from heat stroke to the hospital. Despite the summer
> weather, there was no air-conditioning in the depot, and Amazon refused to
> let fresh air circulate by opening loading doors at either end of the
> depot—for fear of theft. Inside the plant there was no slackening of the
> pace, even as temperatures rose to more than 100 degrees.

> On June 2, 2011, a warehouse employee contacted the US Occupational Safety
> and Health Administration to report that the heat index had reached 102
> degrees in the warehouse and that fifteen workers had collapsed. On June 10
> OSHA received a message on its complaints hotline from an emergency room
> doctor at the Lehigh Valley Hospital: “I’d like to report an unsafe
> environment with an Amazon facility in Fogelsville. . . . Several patients
> have come in the last couple of days with heat related injuries.”_

It's also worth adding that Amazon eventually did retrofit their facilities
with cooling devices but only _after_ their practices drew international media
coverage.

~~~
collyw
While this is terrible, is it worse than say Apple who offshore much of their
labor costs to places with far worse standards?

~~~
tryingagainbro
Should Apple provide US style standards and pay for labor in China?

~~~
ori_b
Depends if you believe that safe work environments are human rights, or just
for Americans.

------
robotcookies
Is Amazon forcing us to install their products even if we don't use it, and
crippling our OS if we try to remove it? No. Is Amazon taking control of small
companies for their IP and then using it to sue competitors with frivolous
lawsuits? (a la sco). Are they suing customers for using competing products?
No, I don't think Amazon is doing these things.

That link only really gets into the fact that they have a large market share.
That alone does't make them a 90s era Microsoft.

~~~
kumarm
Amazon Stores doesn't sell competitor products. Try buying Google Home on
Amazon. Whats worse? Searching for Google Home returns results for Amazon
Echo.

You can find amazon apps on Google PlayStore though.

Amazon is definitely the next Microsoft.

~~~
kazinator
Or, the next Safeway? Try buying another grocery store's brand of milk at
Safeway! The bastards only sell theirs.

No wait, the next BMW! I tried to buy a Toyota and no BMW dealership would
sell me one, can you believe it?

~~~
bubblesorting
\- Safeway and BMW don't tout theirselves as, "Earth's biggest selection of
books, magazines, music, DVDs, videos, electronics, computers, software,
apparel & accessories, shoes, ..." like Amazon does. They don't even claim to
be the biggest selection of groceries/autos.

\- Safeway and BMW aren't known as "The Everything Store"

\- You can buy Toyotas at a BMW dealership. They will be used, but they're
there.

~~~
BurningFrog
Do you claim anyone actually has a bigger selection of "books, magazines,
music, DVDs, videos, electronics, computers, software, apparel & accessories,
shoes, ..."?

~~~
bubblesorting
Nope. That quote was lifted from Amazon.com meta tags.

If I were to guess at what companines might rival Amazon in having the biggest
selection, my top 3 would be: eBay, Alibaba, Rakuten.

------
dforrestwilson
I alternate between being a real fan of Bezos and concern about the company's
sprawling and growing power/interests.

Jeff Bezos is a true visionary, brilliant, and absolutely should be rewarded
for that. We need more folks like him.

On the other hand, at what point has Amazon won enough? Selling things at a
loss to drive competitors out of business verticals is surely bad for the
consumer in the long-term no?

~~~
nerdponx
Interesting that you ascribe all good intentions to Bezos and all ill
intentions to Amazon. How do you know that "Amazon's" growing power interests
are not Bezos'?

~~~
corndoge
Nobody knows anything either way which is why speculating about it is a waste
of time

------
thisisit
The article assertion is very big in computing = Microsoft of the 90s. I can
be wrong but there have not been any anti-competition steps taken at AWS yet.

AWS has been light years ahead when it came to cloud computing and now they
are having the first mover advantage and the dominant position. But will it
last very long? It is very hard to say, over the years companies which were
thought infallible have gone down.

~~~
pacala
Try moving your data outside AWS. Store data, $0.023 / GB / month. Access your
data outside of AWS, $0.090 / GB.

It's more expensive to transfer data outside of AWS once than to store it on
AWS for a quarter.

Not entirely sure what you meed by "anti-competitive steps taken by Microsoft
in the '90s", but holding customer data hostage is as anti-competitive as it
gets.

~~~
otp124
Storage costs are cheaper than network costs. Oranges and apples.

~~~
pacala
Estimating bandwidth costs is fun. From Azure [0], "Within a given region, we
can support up to 1.6 Pbps of inter-datacenter bandwidth.". Pretty reasonable
to assume this is industry standard capability. Using 0.09 $/GB pricing, the
sticker price for a second comes at about $16k, or about $41B per month. We're
several orders of magnitude off a reasonable figure. Safe to say cloud
providers are charging exorbitant markups for bandwidth, which coincidentally
helps customer lock-in.

[0] [https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/how-microsoft-
builds-...](https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/how-microsoft-builds-its-
fast-and-reliable-global-network/)

------
ctvo
tl;dr - Amazon is coming Bad Microsoft... because AWS is a monopoly. And a
whole lot of things that don't make sense.

It might just be too early in the morning for me.

> Part of the reason AWS is gaining market share is because Microsoft’s Azure
> doesn’t boot virtual machines quite as fast.

Somehow I doubt the gap between virtual machine boot time (and this is mostly
applicable only to EC2 vs. Azure Virtual Machines) is worth calling out. It
might be due to existing developer buy-in and familiarity with AWS in addition
to the continual investment in new services and price matching.

Why would I switch to Azure when AWS exceeds its offering and is priced just
as competitively? These are complex platforms with real lock-in. Switching
from AWS to anything else requires a substantial investment in learning new
tools, technologies and best practices. So far AWS has made it so there's
never been a compelling reason for most users.

> ... This too shall pass, but Microsoft will still be smaller. That’s why
> Redmond has staked out the Enterprise cloud market — alas, the segment most
> sensitive to such slow boot times.

On-premise cloud and enterprise customers care about virtual machine boot
times that much huh? I'd love an example or some citation.

> AWS supports most startups as well as all 17 US intelligence agencies —
> taking 350,000 PCs out of places like the CIA, Thank Edward Snowden for that
> one. They are enjoying great success, though AWS partners aren’t enjoying
> themselves quite as much. Put simply, AWS is a pain to deal with if you are
> a customer big enough to be in personal communication and not just a credit
> card number. This, too, is like the old Microsoft.

Anything at all to backup these sentences? I'm not sure they belong together.
How does the CIA moving to AWs connect with AWS being a pain to deal with if
you're a big customer?

> 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.

These two paragraphs are particularly ... cringely. Jeff Bezos in the vest
with the muscular arms is imprinting on these young minds that they can treat
customers and partners badly. I think. Somehow.

------
blfr
Why is AWS so dominant and, surprisingly to me at least, gaining on the
competition?

Google Cloud seems quite neat and in the same price range. OVH is much cheaper
and uses OpenStack. Businesses in the Microsoft sphere should buy Azure quite
easily. And there are many smaller, specialized providers for various needs.

Amazon's lead should be eroding not consolidating. Is it just that they were
first and everyone standardised on their tools? Devops people choosing AWS on
autopilot because it's what they know works?

BTW this has to be the best blog header in the business.

~~~
uiri
Disclaimer: I currently work in Azure. I've formerly worked inside of Google
Cloud, and before that, AWS.

Google runs its own infrastructure on people food and then gives its customers
dog food. Until Google is eating its own dog food, it will be a distant third
in the cloud market. Amazon understands this. They eat their own dog food
throughout the company. They take running their business on AWS to the
extreme.

Microsoft is primarily hampered by the legacy of Windows. The modern cloud
runs on Linux, not Windows. They're at 40% Linux VMs per recently announced
numbers. If Azure succeeds, I think we'll see 80%+ Linux VMs.

I think current market share is misleading. The current market is less than 5%
of what the total market will be in 5-10 years. What matters now is mind share
not market share.

------
Noos
I think people like to blame companies for what are actually serious flaws in
the models of businesses they run altogether. Even if Amazon was broken up,
you'd still see the Chinese fake syndrome because that's more about how peer
to peer internet based selling fails to work when gamed, and how cheap foreign
manufacturing can be used to clone or game the market. Amazon made it worse
mostly by comingling inventory, but there were big problems in the whole "yard
sale" Ebay mode of internet business way before that.

Or with ebooks, the problem isn;t "Amazon is too big," it was publishers and
authors choosing which standard is the least likely to increase piracy and
drive sales, and the customers who actually pay for goods choosing the
marketplace that best serves them. If not Amazon, it would have been Sony or
Kobo, but it couldn't ever be Smashwords once authors found how often works
were pirated from that open platform.

I think people look for scapegoats rather than look at the hard truths about
how the internet as a whole isn't particularly working for many types of
business models. A lot of the protections that have evolved around physical
businesses simply aren't as easy to have or are even available in a net-
connected global economy, and the net tends to try and revive a lot of the
nasty unregulated models of work from the past as well. Piecework, and penny
auctions for example.

------
ridruejo
There's certainly a risk of AWS becoming a monopoly but too early to tell.
Microsoft has a large enterprise user base and increasingly a "good enough"
cloud product that combined with Office 365 is very attractive to those
enterprises. On the technical side Kubernetes is making it easier to move apps
among clouds

------
mtgx
I've never used AWS, but I keep seeing news about large companies or
organizations, such as the recent Pentagon story [1], exposing all of their
customers' data in plain-text.

Is Amazon making it _that easy_ to screw something like that up, or what is
going on here? When you see a few random cases likes, you might think it's
just an engineering making a dumb mistake, but this is starting to seem
_systematic_ , like there's a UX/UI issue at play here that makes all of these
companies that should know better screw-up so easily. Or maybe Amazon just
needs to _make it hard_ to screw something like this up. So what's going on?

[1] - [https://www.pcmag.com/news/357465/pentagon-accidentally-
expo...](https://www.pcmag.com/news/357465/pentagon-accidentally-exposes-web-
monitoring-operation)

~~~
bfrydl
Speaking generally, most services offered by AWS are too low level to be
blamed for problems besides outages or similar issues. They are computing and
storage resources that behave exactly as they are configured to do.

For example, S3 buckets are not public by default. The Pentagon is entirely to
blame for the data breach. Amazon can't make it any harder to make this
mistake, because publicly accessible buckets are an extremely common use case,
and it is already an explicit choice.

~~~
toomuchtodo
Amazon doesn’t allow you to inhibit public buckets through AWS org and service
control policies unless something has changed recently. Pretty big gap in that
feature set.

------
markbnj
Isn't Amazon also AWS' largest customer, followed by Netflix? And I don't know
much about Azure but I wouldn't doubt Microsoft is their largest customer too.
I don't know, this whole piece seems more like Cringely needing something to
write about during his convalescence.

------
tinco
Amazon is becoming the new Microsoft. Microsoft is becoming the new Apple.
Apple is becoming the new Sony. I don't know what's Sony going to be..

~~~
mxuribe
Sony is becoming the new Yugo (as in cheaply-made Zastava Koral car). And, by
the way, your statement chain is right on; nicely done!

[I'll disclose that I'm quite biased _against_ Sony. In fact, where possible,
I avoid purchasing any Sony product at all...and it all goes back to the Sony
rootkit scandal of early 2000s. I don't hold a grudge too often...but in this
case, I still don't trust (nor wish to purchase anything from) Sony.]

~~~
tinco
Same here. Corporate degeneracy like that of Sony is destroying Japan's
economy.

------
dfps
These two aren't the same.

If I want, for any reason, to not use Amazon, I can do that easily (even if I
will have to pay more, it is my choice) by typing any other online store or
seller into my browser, or going to a local store.

For the typical person, they cannot use anything other than Microsoft if they
want to use a computer, period. Except Mac, which many can't afford and which
is limiting in what programs it can run.

~~~
llccbb
I agree that the current state of Amazon's retail goods is not a monopoly. We
will see if that remains true in 10 years.

Currently Microsoft does not have a monopoly on computer OS. They have
practically no stake in mobile computers (smart phones). Mac has a decent
share of desktop/laptop usage. Any claim that MacOS is "limiting in what
programs it can run" is a 10 year old argument or so one sided (Windows is
also limiting in what programs it can run....). The Microsoft of 20 years ago
_did_ have a monopoly on computer OS.

~~~
dfps
I would say they do. For everything except using a few social media apps, the
PC is used (not the mobile).

You may be speaking as someone techy. For most people, what I said still holds
true.

~~~
llccbb
Android has surpassed Windows as the largest share of web traffic[0], though
maybe that means those social apps like Instagram, Facebook, etc. Stat counter
also states that >35% of web browser traffic is mobile not desktop[1].

[0] [http://gs.statcounter.com/press/android-overtakes-windows-
fo...](http://gs.statcounter.com/press/android-overtakes-windows-for-first-
time)

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers#/m...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers#/media/File:Usage_share_of_web_browsers_\(Source_StatCounter\).svg)

------
Dowwie
Doesn't the author mean to say that Amazon is becoming the old Microsoft?

------
jaxondu
Reading just the post title makes me think for a moment that Amazon is
releasing Amazon Linux Home Edition 2018 at its Re:Invent event.

