I remember when the new Target website launched, and they had a 'Credits' page on the website (or a press release?) that listed over 50 partners that made the launch possible, kinda crazy and not surprising that the website failed on launch day.
Additionally, Target partnered with a popular designer to launch their product line on the same day to celebrate the new website, adding insult to injury with a huge traffic spike.
Their inexperience in operating a retail website was painfully obvious. For example, the search results were accurate when really you want to optimize for the customer experience and not accuracy - the first couple pages of search results for an item were all the right items but also all out of stock, so it looked like a very empty store as you clicked through page after page of unavailable items. The search results should have sorted in-stock items to the top by default.
The article missed one huge factor: date farming by AWS/Amazon.
If one has data on pricing and sales across retail and online channels on a national scale, how risky would a purchase of a retailer really be? Not much, as you can pivot towards high sales, high profit products without doubting your strategy
Target, Walmart & other retailers de-risked Amazon's purchase of wholefoods
and lose any credibility? Lets throw away our entire cloud revenue to look at the raw data rather then scraping the public site? Please. This is tin foil hat crazy
If they do it there would be someine at some point who would leak information about this. And this will probably much worse than loosing some customers.
Nonetheless with Amazon Marketplace they already habe a platform where they know every transaction, price and product from third parties.
Not that Target is well-known to be good at security, but if AWS was discovered snooping on their data that would probably be the end of their business. Not to mention the tsunami of lawsuits launched by other companies spooked by the scandal.
I can't imagine any manager or engineer willing to risk their career doing so.
Then again, a director at Volkswagen agreed to intentionally cheat emissions tests, so perhaps an Amazon employee would be foolish enough to snoop on Target's data.
> but if AWS was discovered snooping on their data that would probably be the end of their business. Not to mention the tsunami of lawsuits launched by other companies spooked by the scandal. I can't imagine any manager or engineer willing to risk their career doing so.
I can't imagine an engineer creating a Diesel engine designed for fraud. But it happened. I'd say that in a company with an aggressive business culture like Amazon this is only more likely.
What's the cost/benefit of them doing that to Target? On the upside they could see what's selling well, what margins they have, etc. What's the net value of that information to their retail unit? I'd say it's probably very small.
On the downside, they could lose their most profitable business unit.
Check out all the audits they go through. If you're an enterprise customer with this concern you can get access to those audit reports and see if it's one of the things being looked at by an independent third party.
Besides, all Target has to do is encrypt the data. Boom, non-factor.
Unless they use the cloud merely as storage, the key will have to reside in the cloud for their servers to do anything useful. So the data is never really encrypted to the cloud provider.
I am not saying that the Amazon board will authorize a change in strategy to dig into every customer data. But if I believed that companies internal audit were enough to prevent fraud, there would be no need for a banking regulator for instance.
> What's the cost/benefit of them doing that to Target? On the upside they could see what's selling well, what margins they have, etc. What's the net value of that information to their retail unit? I'd say it's probably very small.
It doesn't have to be a careful CEO decision. It could just be a curious engineer and someone in strategy who appreciates the data. That's probably how it started at VW, not with the board deciding that this is a wise strategy.
That absolutely will not look at your data under any circumstance, even if you specifically ask them to.
Multiple times I was trying to troubleshoot an issue and asked them to "just log into the database" and they said they have very strict policies against that.
I don't know about Amazon but I remember Microsoft sneaking into personal hotmail accounts to find who was leaking information to the press.
Microsoft issued a statement in justification saying that it didn't need a warrant since they consider that the data stored on their services is their, and no warrant is required to search oneself.
Peeking into data would be risky and could be detected. But evaluating server logs is possible without affecting the user. If you know what servers target.com uses and evaluate their load, you can probably learn a lot about their business.
Amazon is a company that cares about credibility above all else, plus word travels fast in software engineering circles. Seems unlikely they would risk snooping
Before AWS or their open marketplace model, Amazon provided e-commerce services for established brick-and-mortar retailers (basically, Amazon-run online shops under the established retailers’ names.)
They quite aggressively mined this for data that was used competitively for Amazon's own online retail operations. I'm not surprised that this combined with Amazon making a big move into brick and mortar retail would worry existing retailer, especially Target, who along with Borders was, IIRC, one of the noteworthy retailers that had been dependent on Amazon's earlier service.
I don't know how strategic that move is in this case. It's not going to slow down Amazon's retail growth, and it'll just cost Target more to transition. They should have sound reasons to move away, like if they found cheaper and better alternatives. I don't know, it feels a little desperate from my point of view.
It seems more defensive than strategic. Seems like you wouldn't want your competitor to be your infrastructure provider and be in physical possession of potentially differentiating assets.
Don't want to because it hurts your pride, or don't want to because it has a practical impact on your ability to compete in your actual market?
Amazon/AWS is not going to fail because Target took away their business. But Target could easily screw up transitioning to another provider, and end up paying a lot in terms of money and wasted effort. Money and effort that would have been better spent improving their core business. Target should concentrate on build a better retail business than Amazon, not worrying about whether that business is built on top of AWS or some other cloud provider.
It's like how Apple compete with Samsung in the smartphone market, but still relies on Samsung as a central component supplier for many of their devices. I'm sure Apple execs would prefer not to give Samsung any money, but they're also smart enough to realise that using only non-Samsung suppliers simply for the sake of it would ultimately be a self-defeating move.
But when they eventually did, and proved that AWS had... targeted them.. then the financial penalties and the loss of confidence would cause enormous harm to AWS.
Which is why AWS would never do this in the first place.
If they are just doing this out of spite it is so silly. Do they think Amazon is going to go broke now and pull out of retail?
If they are paying more to another provider, they are making themselves less competitive in contrast to Amazon, although maybe Microsoft lured them with a discount on Azure.
I don't think it's silly at all. Why help find another branch of a competitor's business? Do you not think that Amazon doesn't use money generated by AWS to help expand their retail business? I'm actually shocked at the number of companies that use AWS even though Amazon is a direct competitor. Netflix comes to mind.
Pretty hard to imagine Amazon destroying the most profitable part of their business by doing something as stupid and illegal as that. But I can see why a company might still hold reservations nonetheless.
I don't understand the synergies of AWS within Amazon. Amazon.com is probably one of the biggest clients, but probably not even the biggest. If they were to split up AWS from Amazon, the entities could be worth more than combined. AWS would lose restrictions of companies that don't like Amazon while Amazon.com could still access the systems.
AWS generates cash and lets the rest of Amazon operate less profitably. Investors are sufficiently impressed by Bezos's innovations (Prime, AWS itself, Kindle books and Amazon Video+Music, recent price shifts at Whole Foods) that they're willing to go along for the ride.
And I don't mean that necessarily negatively: they see Bezos as a visionary in a market he's helping to define.
Somewhat of a side note: Looking at the market share chart, I found it surprising that IBM was substantially larger than Google. Although they lumped IaaS, PaaS, and 'hosted private cloud' together, I still expected Google to be well ahead of anyone else besides AWS and Azure. Can someone confirm the accuracy of these numbers?
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[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 108 ms ] threadI remember when the new Target website launched, and they had a 'Credits' page on the website (or a press release?) that listed over 50 partners that made the launch possible, kinda crazy and not surprising that the website failed on launch day.
Additionally, Target partnered with a popular designer to launch their product line on the same day to celebrate the new website, adding insult to injury with a huge traffic spike.
Their inexperience in operating a retail website was painfully obvious. For example, the search results were accurate when really you want to optimize for the customer experience and not accuracy - the first couple pages of search results for an item were all the right items but also all out of stock, so it looked like a very empty store as you clicked through page after page of unavailable items. The search results should have sorted in-stock items to the top by default.
If one has data on pricing and sales across retail and online channels on a national scale, how risky would a purchase of a retailer really be? Not much, as you can pivot towards high sales, high profit products without doubting your strategy
Target, Walmart & other retailers de-risked Amazon's purchase of wholefoods
Nonetheless with Amazon Marketplace they already habe a platform where they know every transaction, price and product from third parties.
I can't imagine any manager or engineer willing to risk their career doing so.
Then again, a director at Volkswagen agreed to intentionally cheat emissions tests, so perhaps an Amazon employee would be foolish enough to snoop on Target's data.
Absolutely correct. Mutually assured destruction[1].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mutual_assured_destruction
On the downside, they could lose their most profitable business unit.
Check out all the audits they go through. If you're an enterprise customer with this concern you can get access to those audit reports and see if it's one of the things being looked at by an independent third party.
Besides, all Target has to do is encrypt the data. Boom, non-factor.
I am not saying that the Amazon board will authorize a change in strategy to dig into every customer data. But if I believed that companies internal audit were enough to prevent fraud, there would be no need for a banking regulator for instance.
It doesn't have to be a careful CEO decision. It could just be a curious engineer and someone in strategy who appreciates the data. That's probably how it started at VW, not with the board deciding that this is a wise strategy.
I think it's totally healthy to maintain paranoia about AWS if you are competing against them.
Multiple times I was trying to troubleshoot an issue and asked them to "just log into the database" and they said they have very strict policies against that.
There is no way they have any of Target's data.
Doesn't Reddit have a policy against secretly editing user's posts? Didn't precisely that happen during the election by an admin?
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2016/nov/25/reddit-ceo-a...
Microsoft issued a statement in justification saying that it didn't need a warrant since they consider that the data stored on their services is their, and no warrant is required to search oneself.
Microsoft can not get a warrant in any case: they are not a law enforcement agency.
They quite aggressively mined this for data that was used competitively for Amazon's own online retail operations. I'm not surprised that this combined with Amazon making a big move into brick and mortar retail would worry existing retailer, especially Target, who along with Borders was, IIRC, one of the noteworthy retailers that had been dependent on Amazon's earlier service.
Amazon/AWS is not going to fail because Target took away their business. But Target could easily screw up transitioning to another provider, and end up paying a lot in terms of money and wasted effort. Money and effort that would have been better spent improving their core business. Target should concentrate on build a better retail business than Amazon, not worrying about whether that business is built on top of AWS or some other cloud provider.
It's like how Apple compete with Samsung in the smartphone market, but still relies on Samsung as a central component supplier for many of their devices. I'm sure Apple execs would prefer not to give Samsung any money, but they're also smart enough to realise that using only non-Samsung suppliers simply for the sake of it would ultimately be a self-defeating move.
Which is why AWS would never do this in the first place.
https://www.geekwire.com/2011/target-finally-parts-ways-amaz...
If they are paying more to another provider, they are making themselves less competitive in contrast to Amazon, although maybe Microsoft lured them with a discount on Azure.
OTOH the cost of moving cloud providers, if significant, is going to be an additional operational expense that would make them less competitive.
It's like Apple buying chips from Samsung.
Why would you put your valuable data on servers being hosted by a competitor?
It's not like they don't have any other options either.
And I don't mean that necessarily negatively: they see Bezos as a visionary in a market he's helping to define.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14602836