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A comment on Amazon and the “profitless business model” fallacy (2013). Parent comment

Re:Amazon and the “profitless business model” fallacy (2013) by silisili on Thursday December 23, 2021 @10:28PM (#29669801)
That's what's so beautiful to me... someone had this crazy idea to sell spare cycles, and now it's the backbone of not only the company, but an entire market segment.

Don't know who really thought of it, or designed it well enough to make it work, but hope all those folks were well, well rewarded.

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Re:Amazon and the “profitless business model” fallacy (2013) by adrianmsmith on Friday December 24, 2021 @10:47AM (#29674532)
> someone had this crazy idea to sell spare cycles

I've heard this too, but I don't think it can possibly be true. That would mean that, at the start, any service or VM etc. you started on AWS would only work during non-peak Amazon hours. So your website or app would be down if the traffic to Amazon's website ramped up. I can't imagine many companies going for that offering. If that was the product that AWS originally offered I can't imagine it would have been successful.

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Re:Amazon and the “profitless business model” fallacy (2013) by HWR_14 on Friday December 24, 2021 @06:57PM (#29678967)
> That would mean that, at the start, any service or VM etc. you started on AWS would only work during non-peak Amazon hours.

While that's true, at the time I read this "peak Amazon hours" were a few hours on cyber Monday. In fact, that's probably still true.

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Re:Amazon and the “profitless business model” fallacy (2013) by 8note on Friday December 24, 2021 @03:48PM (#29677597)
I imagine peak involves scaling up the total number of instances, and the house of cards falls down without you growth.

Disclaimer: I work in non-aws amazon, and my imagination is my own.

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