You know, there's something about Amazon. I keep noticing things that are just a little off, morally. First it was the one-click patent. Then I learned that their employment agreement forbids you from starting a startup with anyone else who has worked at Amazon, even if you didn't know them. (Don't worry, they'd never dare enforce it.) And now they sue someone simply for making a better UI to their lame site. There's starting to be a pattern.
If Alexa had a decent UI, Statsaholic wouldn't be a threat. Instead of suing this guy for doing their own job properly, they should just fix Alexa.
It seems pretty clear that you're right. What makes it hard to stomach though is that they're seriously on to something with S3 and EC2. Moral issues aside, should developers be wary of the poison spreading to the web services division that they've built their startups around?
It would make me feel better if the other shoe dropped and some other huge company released some competition for S3 and EC2 (I'm looking at you Google). That would provide some competitive protection from them screwing people over and another viable option. I would hope for a startup to fill the void, but this seems like as good a candidate as any for the type of problem where the big guys have some advantage.
It would make me feel better if the other shoe dropped and some other huge company released some competition for S3 and EC2 (I'm looking at you Google).
It's confusing to talk about Amazon as if it were a single acting agent. It seems to me as if someone there has just hired some overly enthusiastic lawyers, and top management/PR department hasn't realized how much it's hurting the company just yet.
This doesn't take away from the engineers that seem to have done a great job implementing S3/EC2 before the competition has much of anything comprable to offer.
If top management were paying attention, it would notice that that's a dumb, bad, evil thing to do. So, either top management is evil, or it's not paying attention.
If Alexa had a decent UI, Statsaholic wouldn't be a threat. Instead of suing this guy for doing their own job properly, they should just fix Alexa.