About four years ago we have attempted to get their software . It felt like I was dealing with Cisco sales people circa 1998. They were clueless on how to do a multi hundred thousand dollar deal - think slow, inefficient, inflexible, unwilling to compromise on extra $500 add on that would have ended up being a rounding error.
ugh the pain that comes from negotiating our contract every year. Or the pain that comes from trying to get trial licenses. Or the pain we're seeing now from switching to SaaS.
I'm not sure if it's actually a gray area, since I'm pretty sure leveraging your market dominance in one area to compete in another is illegal anti-competitive behavior. Isn't that what the whole Microsoft antitrust case was about? It's too bad the government pretty much gave up on enforcing antitrust law for 20 years, since it feels like similar practices became normalized due to lack of enforcement.
Leveraging your monopoly to compete in another area is illegal. Leveraging a strong position isn’t and Amazon is a long ways from a monopoly.
In the EU, it is "dominant market position" (and explicitly so) that's the threshold for the Commission to take competition action, for instance.
(not trying to argue they aren't dominant. just curious)
British Airways only had a 38% market share when they were sued for abusing their dominant market position in 1998 (which was upheld by the Court of Justice in 2007)
That really depends on interpretation, which has shifted over time and continues to shift. IIRC, recent interpretations of some types of anti-competitive behavior have been rather literal and required something very close to a literal monopoly, which has had the effect of neutering antitrust law in all but the most blatant of cases.
My understanding is that it's arguable that it's anti-competitive to leverage market share advantages more broadly (e.g. antitrust law could be used to constrain/break-up a duopoly).
And while there are probably some services on AWS you can’t find at a competitor - that’s mostly a choice (aka profit margin) made by the competitor.
Open source works fine, and does quite well as a business model (use it as free advertising).
What has happened here is a plain old case of monopoly.
Once markets are no longer efficient, the model breaks down. Amazon can use its resources to extinguish competition with their own product.
This is why we need antitrust law.
It's not a failure of capitalism, its not a failure of the businesses involved its just what happens when you run a freeish market. That is, things get out of whack to the point we the people feel it is unjust, it would eventually right itself but this would take a long time and likely do more interim damage than its work allowing, so we fiddle with it, hopefully not breaking anything in the process.
If we think of the system as a delicate natural balance that we should try our best not to disturb too much I think we've immediately taken a very specific stance which itself shouldn't be above critical examination. It is, after all, just a social system and all social systems involve some level of design whether we like that fact or not.
In theory, we could conceive of the possibility of an economic system that both preserves the autonomy and independence of its actors while also preventing monopolies from emerging in the first place. Its a hard problem to wrestle with but its preferable to acquiescing to the blind faith in the invisible hand. We should never give up on an effort to understand how we could evolve our current systems into ones that work better (imagine if we took the same stance with technology).
Take for instance Amazon RDS which is a family of managed relational database services. I don't think "Amazon RDS for MySQL" is an unfair use of the "MySQL" trademark, even if Amazon haven't asked Oracle's permission. The reason here is that it's much clearer in the way RDS is branded that it's not endorsed by the database engines it supports, it uses their trademarks to describe the engines they integrate with which seems reasonable in my view. Amazon RDS is still its own independent brand.
"Amazon Elasticsearch Service" crosses the mark in my opinion because it blurs the line between the two brands and in many ways implies that Amazon actually made Elasticsearch themselves.
> You're kind of right about this, but it's the issue that AWS just has a massive head-start with any client that already uses AWS. They don't really out-compete, they just use their existing vendor lock-in to gain an advantage.
Can't client run his own Elasticsearch inside AWS? By installing and maintaining it yourself (or contracting someone to do it for you).
Then I don't see vendor lock-in sense: "We choose AWS to host us, now we have no real choice but to use Amazon Elasticsearch Service". Am I missing something here?
For the customer, the biggest advantage of AWS' SaaS offerings over a 3rd party's (hosted on AWS) is the billing. AWS Marketplace negates that. Maybe at some cost to the provider, but I just found ScyllaDB and RedisLabs there, so it must be working for some.
No, it doesn't work for RedisLabs. Amazon offers managed Redis called AWS EC Redis and recently someone I knew decided to move their entire Redis (multiple) clusters from RedisLabs to AWS EC. RedisLabs lost hundred of thousand dollars.
While I understand that some people viewed a successful OSS project is akin to Wordpress: lots of hosting providers, rich ecosystems, _and_ Wordpress main company is still making good money out of it; this is not apple to apple comparison (can't compare Redis and Wordpress).
Redis belongs to the group of MongoDB, ElasticSearch, etc.
You're kind of right about this, but it's the issue that AWS just has a massive head-start with any client that already uses AWS. They don't really out-compete, they just use their existing vendor lock-in to gain an advantage. And really, by using your dominance in one "market" to gain an advantage elsewhere ends up feeling like a bit of a grey area.
> To add insult to injury, Amazon made the mistake of leveraging the ElasticSearch brand a few times too many in ways that just rub the ElasticSearch people the wrong way.
You're phrasing this in a way like Amazon "leveraging the ElasticSearch brand" isn't a trademark issue. Is "leveraging the trademarks of another company" suddenly okay (as long as you don't do it 'a few times too many') as long as you're Amazon? What if Amazon started selling smart thermostats by "leveraging" the Nest brand?