> The A to Z in the Amazon logo hurts AWS because big companies are worried Amazon will compete with them (if they don’t already) and will use AWS data and information against those companies.
This always had a vibe of a conspiracy theory to me. If this were to ever happen and it came out, AWS would be screwed for all eternity. You just need one disgruntled employee to keep a screenshot of their auditing logs to make all hell break loose. I think most companies who actually consider this to be part of their threat model are full of themselves to actually think that Amazon would do this to their brand and the trust associated with it for the benefit of looking into systems that most likely don't contain information that's as interesting as company execs and engineers think.
I once knew someone who forbid his employees to use Google because he said that Google would copy his ideas and that his employees would leak them if they even searched for related key words.
When Amazon started expanding in retail beyond books, they signed supplier agreements to source inventory, the same way department stores have for decades.
Then Amazon used the retail sales information they gathered from these relationships to structure their Marketplace and Fulfilled by Amazon products, breaking the exclusivity clauses in their existing supplier agreements. Amazon lost lawsuits over this.
Kinda hard to call it a conspiracy theory when Amazon is upfront and out loud about their intention to use customer data to enter new markets whenever they see fit.
You don't have to look that deep to see the example.
Walmart categorically refuses to buy anything that runs on Amazon simply because amazon competes with walmart directly in retail.
having said that, i'm sure there are exceptions and some examples where they do have some stuff they use hosted on aws but that's the exception not the norm.
But yet Netflix is all in on Amazon even though Amazon Prime Video exists.
Apple depends on Samsung for many of its components and Google pays Apple billions a year to be the default search engine. Companies cooperate and compete with each other all the time.
They do, and in some cases or exceptions they bypass whatever internal rule they imposed on themselves just like your examples.
However, whether it's Amazon or another, it doesn't change the fact that businesses are in general averse to do business with a company that has shown in the past that it will enter a new market if it sees money in it at the cost of its partner relationship.
How many software companies have refused to run Windows because MS competes with them? How many OEMs went all in on Linux when MS started selling Surface computers?
They don't need to look at customer data to get valuable insights. Information on bandwidth, used services, accounts and billing alone will probably get you good insight into non-public information on the business. And Amazon is very well allowed to look at this data.
I can't comment on whether Amazon would access utilize internal information for competitive purposes--I hope they don't--but it's definitely not smart to reveal sensitive product information in discussions. At one point the AWS non-disclosure agreement essentially said that they could use any information they remembered from the conversation to develop products. Unfortunately it came up a couple of companies ago so I don't have the exact text any more. It was surprising to say the least.
I love Amazon's cloud services and use them every day. Even so, you can't lose site of the fact they are a formidable competitor.
This always had a vibe of a conspiracy theory to me. If this were to ever happen and it came out, AWS would be screwed for all eternity. You just need one disgruntled employee to keep a screenshot of their auditing logs to make all hell break loose. I think most companies who actually consider this to be part of their threat model are full of themselves to actually think that Amazon would do this to their brand and the trust associated with it for the benefit of looking into systems that most likely don't contain information that's as interesting as company execs and engineers think.
I once knew someone who forbid his employees to use Google because he said that Google would copy his ideas and that his employees would leak them if they even searched for related key words.