<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>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>munk-a</author><text>I know it&amp;#x27;s hard to do when you&amp;#x27;re making good money and would be going against co-workers.&lt;p&gt;But, if you see something, say something.  This crap continues because there are too many folks that are happy to help support immoral business practices for some extra scratch.  This isn&amp;#x27;t all on you in particular but when google folks started raising hell about Chinese censorship the company was forced to move.  We all have the power to withdraw consent over how our labour will be used and, as software developers, we&amp;#x27;ve got a strong enough employment market that we have real power to help make companies behave better - power that folks working in the warehouse are absolutely deprived of.</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>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>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></comment>