Quote:
Originally Posted by jmakin
For me and one member of my team who is pretty savvy to the inner workings of this business it was pretty depressing. We saw one booth there that did exactly what we aspire to be with our new product, and they did it better than we can.
This shift to this kind of cloud infrastructure really goes against what we're trying to build and sell. Sucks tbh. Oh well.
If its just a booth from a non-Amazon company, I wouldn't be too depressed. I've talked to a whole lot of vendors at conferences and at least half are full of ****. No real demos and blatantly promising functionality that doesn't exist or contradicts their own website.
But if your business depends on people not going to the cloud at the infrastructure level... you're fighting a big uphill battle (and in all honesty will probably lose). There are a lot of good reasons the cloud makes sense, and even if "the Next Big Thing" in 10-20 years is different, it almost certainly won't look anything at all like the model where companies run their own data centers and buy software.
Quote:
Originally Posted by suzzer99
And holy **** is the vendor lockin for AWS gonna be a nightmare. It will make the current Oracle situation so many companies are stuck in look like a parking ticket. But YOLO - not my problem. I bet Amazon becomes the first $2 trillion company.
I don't think the vendor lock-in is going to be quite that bad. Google and Microsoft are growing fast. You're even starting to hear more about Alibaba Cloud - which is probably one of the first that I think can actually gain a non-trivial chunk of the market.
Amazon also has a lot of the first-mover problems where they're now dealing with legacy code/constraints that GCP and Azure can address right from the start. GCP at least (I don't have any experience with Azure) also knows that the secret to stealing AWS's business is to make that transition pretty seamless. So something like GCS (the Google equivalent to S3) has a completely compatible API to s3. Many major libraries can switch between the two cloud storages seamlessly.
I don't think AWS will ever get to the point where they can start making massive margins without fear of people leaving. Although who knows...
That being said, my one investing regret is not putting a whole bunch of money in Amazon before the broke out AWS. It was pretty clear AWS was going to be massive and a lot of non-tech people didn't really get the real scale/importance of it and were focusing just on their retail business. But I got convinced to stick with index funds... and here I am.