I've been reading about Amazon in light of the location service… thing, and in the wake of the Mapbox license change thing.
Obviously open source has something to do with this. The Stratechery piece basically describes that correctly, and Joe Morrison wrote about this specific instance.
But on the other hand, I can't keep Slack out of my head, and this bit about Slack:
But Slack’s struggle to succeed as an independent company sadly mirrors that of many one-time innovators in enterprise productivity. Mailbox died, and Acompli sold to Microsoft where it became the mobile Outlook app. Evernote is a pale shadow of its former self. Of that early cohort, only Box and Dropbox became — and still remain — public companies.
And Newtown quoting Aaron Levie:
“The reality with the enterprise is that you can have the best product, but that’s not good enough,” Levie told me. “You need distribution. And what Salesforce has — they have the procurement officers, they have the finance people. They have all of the apparatus you need to interact with to sell software, and they have it for the top 100,000 corporations around the world.”
One realization that took me way too long was this:
Enterprise sales are bad because enterprise buying is bad.
You know all those sales people at your startup working the phone? They exist because they have mirror-image procurement/buying people on the other end. The sales and the procurement people have a particular dance they do, both extracting their toll on their respective companies, both having a little fun talking about sports on the phone.
The government has really been thinking about this one: 18F, one of "Obama's secret startups", was as much a strategy to bring tech knowledge into the government as it was to improve the way that the government buys things - and they really thought about how to buy things better. The corporate world has had similar wake-up calls, surely, but on the collective level, everyone's current enthusiasm for "playing it safe" buy going with AWS or GCP and deciding to just go offline when everyone else does - this individual behavior is summing up to an unexhaustable source of support for a rather bad agglomeration at the very top of the tech and business world.
This is sort of where we go back to Amazon. Amazon is at the extreme of procurement efficiency. It has whole programs for selling to the government. It has compliance with everything. It has tons of sales people, and lots of ways to pay, and lots of programs to get startups and venture-backed companies on board. Basically, AWS has put a lot of work into making sure that everyone has an AWS bill, and from there on everything is some degree of cross-selling.
Which means that, if you aren't AWS, you have to sell your product and sell a new contract. If you're AWS, everything is a line item.
If you're an open core business, then, you can have to sell people on a relationship with your company running the service (probably on AWS or GCP) or those same customers could just get the AWS or GCP-direct version of your software. Slack wasn't open source, but it didn't have strong enough IP that they could just sue Microsoft - and the speed of Redmond's copiers meant that it really didn't matter that they had to do a clean-room implementation.
As Stratechery notes correctly, a lot of Amazon's bad behavior in terms of using open source software and giving back nothing in exchange is very legal and very cool. The capability of FAANG companies to roughly copy products and then undercut them on price or to take advantage of their existing contract structure (exactly what Microsoft did to Slack by pushing Teams so hard) is also probably legal when taken alone. And it's kind of unstoppable at the mid and high levels: if you have a Slack-sized business and the big players see that there's money in it, then they will, eventually, compete. There is apparently no limit to how many products large companies are now able to maintain in parallel.
But on the larger scale, there's, of course, monopolies, and it seems likely that we're going to see some real action around them next year. And on the long-term scale, there's the possibility of overextraction: these monopolies haven't really been inventing anything, and if they discourage or destroy too many inventors, then it's unclear where the future will come from.