<story><title>Amazon met with startups about investing, then launched competing products</title><url>https://www.wsj.com/articles/amazon-tech-startup-echo-bezos-alexa-investment-fund-11595520249</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>rckoepke</author><text>What types of AWS data would be trawled? Are we talking about data inside S3 buckets, database schemas, particular architecure styles, the fact that a product is consuming {x, y, z} amounts of cloud resources, or simply &amp;quot;spending $m &amp;#x2F; year&amp;quot; in gross?</text></item><item><author>former-aws</author><text>Cannot up vote this enough. During my time both at Retail and AWS it was perfectly normal to trawl production customer data and come up with ideas to launch competing products. Prices were always set lower or free offering justified as data-driven and customer obsession. I hated the gas lighting their customers and left in disgust of the company and its leadership which encourages that behavior.</text></item><item><author>throwaway_aws</author><text>&amp;quot;An Amazon spokesman said the company doesn’t use confidential information that companies share with it to build competing products&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;Maybe...but in the past, AWS proactively looked at traction of products hosted on its platform, built competing products, and then scraped &amp;amp; targeted customer list of those hosted products. In fact, I was on a team in AWS that did exactly that. Why wouldn&amp;#x27;t their investing arm do the same?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>redredrobot</author><text>I worked in an area where it is really hard to figure out exactly what workloads were being run and where it would have been extremely useful to know even basic things like CPU utilization patterns, network throughput patterns, etc for a specific customer.&lt;p&gt;We had access to absolutely none of that information. We flew blind, relying entirely on the fact that we gave our customers enough hand-holding support that they would willingly volunteer information about their workloads so we could help them optimize it&amp;#x2F;save money.&lt;p&gt;No one even attempted to get more detailed customer information AFAIK because it would have been extremely against company culture. That isn&amp;#x27;t Earning Trust or having Customer Obsession. The idea of reading data in someone&amp;#x27;s S3 bucket or inspecting what is happening inside of someone&amp;#x27;s EC2 instance in any way was unthinkable. Amazon is huge and imperfect, but from what I saw AWS takes data privacy extremely seriously.</text></comment>
<story><title>Amazon met with startups about investing, then launched competing products</title><url>https://www.wsj.com/articles/amazon-tech-startup-echo-bezos-alexa-investment-fund-11595520249</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>rckoepke</author><text>What types of AWS data would be trawled? Are we talking about data inside S3 buckets, database schemas, particular architecure styles, the fact that a product is consuming {x, y, z} amounts of cloud resources, or simply &amp;quot;spending $m &amp;#x2F; year&amp;quot; in gross?</text></item><item><author>former-aws</author><text>Cannot up vote this enough. During my time both at Retail and AWS it was perfectly normal to trawl production customer data and come up with ideas to launch competing products. Prices were always set lower or free offering justified as data-driven and customer obsession. I hated the gas lighting their customers and left in disgust of the company and its leadership which encourages that behavior.</text></item><item><author>throwaway_aws</author><text>&amp;quot;An Amazon spokesman said the company doesn’t use confidential information that companies share with it to build competing products&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;Maybe...but in the past, AWS proactively looked at traction of products hosted on its platform, built competing products, and then scraped &amp;amp; targeted customer list of those hosted products. In fact, I was on a team in AWS that did exactly that. Why wouldn&amp;#x27;t their investing arm do the same?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>bg24</author><text>Can speak for AWS. Only the later. Basically the usage information for cloud resources. This constitutes the foundation for billing. BTW, this is be true for any cloud, any SAAS.&lt;p&gt;There is no way an employee can look into customer data. There&amp;#x27;s enough trail inside AWS to prove that without any doubt.</text></comment>