There was a flaw in our product that had one of our customers pushing to use Amazon's offering. Turns out Amazon's service cost about 4x what it cost us to do it ourselves. It wasn't obvious at the time given Amazon's purposefully obtuse pricing.
Eventually we fixed the bug, brought our customer back in line with the rest, saved some money, and have continued providing this service much cheaper than Amazon. I think it works for us because of a few reasons:
1. The service we offer is challenging enough that most dev teams won't want to do it themselves, they'll outsource it
2. Amazon has little incentive to charge less (see #1), little competition
3. We're small enough that we can still provide that face-to-face level of service and hand holding that's nearly impossible to get from a larger org
Amazon/Microsoft/Google may come into a particular market, but it doesn't automatically imply that they can (or even will) do it better/cheaper/faster.
http://scripting.com/stories/2007/04/04/coexistingWithPlatfo...
Sometimes developers choose a niche that's either directly in the path of the vendor, or even worse, on the roadmap of the vendor. In those cases, they don't really deserve our sympathy. It's almost like a game of PR, there's no way you're not going to have a fight on your hands.
Further discussed by Joel Spolsky
"A good platform always has opportunities for applications that aren’t just gap-fillers. These are the kind of application that the vendor is unlikely ever to consider a core feature, usually because it’s vertical — it’s not something everyone is going to want. There is exactly zero chance that Apple is ever going to add a feature to the iPhone for dentists. Zero."
This is why I’m bullish on cloud agnostic tech. These practices don’t typically fair well in the enterprise space. This is why companies like MSFT are interesting to me. They partner and rarely kill. Amazon is the complete opposite.
https://smile.amazon.com/AmazonBasics-Desktop-Mini-Condenser...
The shape of the microphone suggests it's a directional microphone (and if you read the reviews, people think it is directional). That's perhaps not a scam, but certainly deceptive.
How the times have changed.
Example: Do you really think that the warm embrace of VMware Horizon and Citrix on Azure is the beginning of a long and fruitful relationship?
Specifically within healthcare. You think large Pharma companies will use AWS after the pill pocket acquisition? Do you think once Amazon.com starts listing prosthetics large life sciences companies will run on AWS? What about providers? Do you think health systems will choose AWS as their cloud once Amazon launches their version of KP?
I don’t see Azure or GCP getting into these specific markets.
More likely would be that Google, Amazon, Microsoft and some affiliated company would be competing in a space where telemetry from something like a prosthetic was reporting information that had some value.
In any situation, the downside of renting something is that you lose control. It is something that you need to think about and incorporate into your business strategy in some scenarios.
Yeah, this is so typical of AWS to do this, and I know we're not alone.
Hard to make a B To B Amazon tool these days.