1. Price and compete aggressively to grow market share, put competitors out of business, and even transform the market, if possible
2. Once you become the dominant player (i.e. a monopoly), raise prices (or don't lower them) as much as possible without damaging your market position
This is why it's so important, especially in the US, for government to begin aggressively enforcing antitrust law again -- something we've failed to do against companies founded since the 1980s.
Those laws are there for a reason - not just as a weapon against "evil" (though Standard Oil was admittedly pretty bad) but to keep the market healthy and growing. There are so many positive second- and third-order effects that occur only when competition is healthy and well-regulated, and when prices are transparent.
It already does and it didn’t particularly stop. The problem is that there is no obvious damage to consumers here (what US antitrust law is based on).
GCP and Azure are both significant players with similar offerings. The fact that people use proprietary Amazon APIs to manage stuff isn’t a high enough bar to show a monopoly.
“We are locked into their product because it’s a big engineering expense to move off” isn’t an argument for monopoly busting. It’s a reflection on poor business decisions by the complainer. It has never worked against Oracle/MS in the past, it won’t start now.
A whole generation of engineers is about to relearn the importance of open source that drove everyone to open source stacks 15 years ago.
it's not really about open-source, but about inter-operability and open protocols.
Imagine if AOL internet was the defacto standard, and every website is their own walled garden? Oh wait, no we already have that - it's the mobile app ecosystem!
The reason the web is so successful (but not monopolistic) is that the http protocol is open, and the HTML standards are open (at least, until google started meddling now since they are almost a browser monopoly...)
So laws for anti-trust should now take that into account - platform monopolies can be beaten by forcing interoperability via legislation.
Use an eggshell architecture, put your dependencies on the edge. global dependencies are the enermy.
For IAC, thats a slightly different story.
The problem with the above narrative in this case (which I agree is generally true), is that's not what AWS did. If you look at the announcement history shared in a sibling comment you'll see that so much of it happened long before the cloud wars really heated up. I find that particularly curious. Is that because margins used to be very very fat and AWS just trimmed them down as economies of scale allowed in an attempt to (unsuccessfully) stave off competition? Is it just coincidence that the system found a natural level of margin efficiency right around when competitive pressures started to ramp up? Something else?
I have zero insight on why it has played out this way. I'd love to know though.
Though making it harder for cloud competitors was certainly good for them as well.
It's like with any startup, your biggest competitor is what people do currently, not necessarily another company, let alone another startup. For many software startups, the biggest competitor is something like pen and paper, excel, standard email, etc.
I was at a startup that was an early and very large user of AWS. The alternatives for us at the time would have been companies like Rackspace and other innovative (at the time) colo type providers. AWS wasn't super competitive one a $/compute basis at that point, and the credits didn't last very long, but it was wwwaaayyyyy more flexible. Add in the incredible convenience of S3 relative to most other alternatives at the time and it was an easy, though not obviously cheap, option.
The common narrative I hear though is it was the startup focus that won it for AWS. Everyone else was chasing the on-prem and enterprise market as you said. AWS went have startups, dangled some modest credits to make it happen, and they stuck around. The conventional wisdom was this is a terrible mistake. Enterprises pay the bills, startups go bust in an economic downturn (and we're coming out of a cycle at this point so companies are understandably nervous). Except those startups that AWS attracted turned into Netflix, Airbnb, Uber, Lyft, etc. and whole host of voracious consumers of infrastructure. The startups had become the enterprises. The competitors were _still_ trying to convince enterprises that cloud was safe enough to adopt. They belatedly realized they'd played the wrong game, tempted some of the not-so-startup-anymore companies across with more competitive pricing commitments, and finally the battle began. By this stage AWS had won most of the viable early adopters and used that as the beachhead to grow into the big enterprise and gov areas.
At least that's the narrative I've been told a few times over the years, and it seems plausible and maps onto my own experience. Though all of that experience has been startups and not enterprise/gov so it's a very skewed perspective.
In fact invite other players to join you to heat up the capital market might be a beneficial deal, as it indicates interests.
Antitrust penalties, more often than not, aren't even as big as the extra profit a company made!
Each company gets split into 3 smaller firms, each with access to all the IP of the mothership. They get to fight for their customers, and barter over business assets, to figure out who owns what.
They would not fight over customers, in the same way the breakup of AT&T did not result in a fight over customers - only a more complete, nimble, and effective domination of the entire US that lasts to this day.
These companies are hamstrung by their size and internal cultural infighting - you will break them into much more effective units than they can culturally achieve themselves.
The typical trotted out example of Microsoft is an aberration - Microsoft did not believe anything bad would ever happen, was horribly defiant, and refused to prepare. It still bounced back anyway, to a point of serious domination again.
Meanwhile, all of these current tech companies are prepared for this eventuality, as AT&T did.
But for me the biggest "for" argument isn't that the broken up companies will compete with each other (that makes no sense because you'd break them up along business lines where they don't compete anyway).
Instead for me it is that it removes cross subsidies both financial (as in "we can give away this loss making application because we make so much money from X) and marketing (our new product Y is inferior to the existing product Z but we can make Y the default in our other apps and then people will just use it).
This removal of cross subsidies does increase competition.
However it's possible to force the removal of cross subsidies by other means (eg, the old "force the user to be able to select the search engine in Internet Explorer" regulation etc).
X2i is interesting, but may overshoot the mark for the service I’m thinking of, but might be appropriate for another. I may have to try again as to whether I can make the r6i math work.
- Gravitron 2 is slightly cheaper than Intel instances, with a greater price/performance ratio—at least for some applications.
- m6i is same price as m5, but new generation of CPU and increased network performance.
- gp3 is 20% cheaper than gp2 and has better baseline performance. It can also scale performance independently of size, so no more overprovisioning storage to hit a certain IOPS.
- S3 has IA, Glacier, Glacier Deep Archive, all offering cheaper storage but more expensive retrieval.
Not defending AWS here, just noting that they don't seem to be interested in direct price reductions anymore.
(EDIT: Previously I stated gp3 and gp2 were the same price. Thanks zerocrates and maxxam for the correction.)