Amazon Seeking 2nd Headquarters: Canadian Cities Pitch Interest

[geotag277]

Originally Posted by casper

The reason for including Office 365 is that a company has a choice. It can go buy Exchange and SharePoint licenses then get IaaS from Amazon (or whoever) and setup its Exchange and SharePoint server. Alternatively it gets the correct Office 365 subscription from Microsoft with all that bundled in.

Same argument can be made for selling on amazon, so again, I ask, why exclude Amazon's "PaaS" online shopping platform and yet include Office 365? It doesn't make any sense.

[geotag277]

Originally Posted by casper

Getting back to the HQ2 point. Amazon is not as dominant a player in everything it does. Yes, it is a force not to be ignored. Stats show over 95% of goods sold in Canada are still going through the Bay, Sobeys, Walmart and all those traditional retailers. Perhaps Canadian cities should be going after all those HQ2 instead of focusing on Amazon.

The writing is on the wall for big box retail. It's a good thing Amazon isn't dominant in certain businesses. Just like it's a good thing Daimler wasn't dominant in the horse and carriage industry.

[casper]

Originally Posted by geotag277

Same argument can be made for selling on amazon, so again, I ask, why exclude Amazon's "PaaS" online shopping platform and yet include Office 365? It doesn't make any sense.

I did not write the article (or do the analysis that backs it up), but if I did I would include Amazon "marketplace" activities but not its direct online sales.

In one case is is offering a cloud service (selling staff) for another business. In the other case it is an internal IT service.

[geotag277]

Originally Posted by casper

I did not write the article (or do the analysis that backs it up), but if I did I would include Amazon "marketplace" activities but not its direct online sales.

In one case is is offering a cloud service (selling staff) for another business. In the other case it is an internal IT service.

The reason the comparison is stupid is because Amazon is built from the ground up as a cloud "product as a service" company. Microsoft is a dinosaur attempting to enter the cloud market.

Many of Amazon's traditional revenue streams, including marketplace, fulfilment by amazon, and related services - are essentially cloud based "product as a service" offerings. They account for 30+ billion in revenue, and are growing year over year at a amount larger than the entire Microsoft cloud "IaaS" business.

Including Office 365 in Microsoft's "cloud" bucket and not including Amazon's "PaaS" offerings is absurd. As is much of this commentary on how Microsoft is on the precipice of overtaking Amazon in any reasonable shape in this space. People outside technology continue to not have a clue.

[1overcosc]

Originally Posted by geotag277

The reason the comparison is stupid is because Amazon is built from the ground up as a cloud "product as a service" company. Microsoft is a dinosaur attempting to enter the cloud market.

Many of Amazon's traditional revenue streams, including marketplace, fulfilment by amazon, and related services - are essentially cloud based "product as a service" offerings. They account for 30+ billion in revenue, and are growing year over year at a amount larger than the entire Microsoft cloud "IaaS" business.

Including Office 365 in Microsoft's "cloud" bucket and not including Amazon's "PaaS" offerings is absurd. As is much of this commentary on how Microsoft is on the precipice of overtaking Amazon in any reasonable shape in this space. People outside technology continue to not have a clue.

Preach. As a cloud engineer myself, I laugh at some of the comments some make. Amazon truly is dominant in cloud.

[Corndogger]

Originally Posted by geotag277

The reason the comparison is stupid is because Amazon is built from the ground up as a cloud "product as a service" company. Microsoft is a dinosaur attempting to enter the cloud market.

Many of Amazon's traditional revenue streams, including marketplace, fulfilment by amazon, and related services - are essentially cloud based "product as a service" offerings. They account for 30+ billion in revenue, and are growing year over year at a amount larger than the entire Microsoft cloud "IaaS" business.

Including Office 365 in Microsoft's "cloud" bucket and not including Amazon's "PaaS" offerings is absurd. As is much of this commentary on how Microsoft is on the precipice of overtaking Amazon in any reasonable shape in this space. People outside technology continue to not have a clue.

You have no idea what you're talking about. Just because you nonstop word vomit on every topic that's brought up doesn't make you an expert in any of them.

[Corndogger]

Originally Posted by 1overcosc

Preach. As a cloud engineer myself, I laugh at some of the comments some make. Amazon truly is dominant in cloud.

Only if you severely restrict what comprises cloud computing.

[geotag277]

Originally Posted by Corndogger

You have no idea what you're talking about. Just because you nonstop word vomit on every topic that's brought up doesn't make you an expert in any of them.

Truly a breathlessly stunning retort. I believe this reply single handedly qualifies you to write financial reporting for Forbes.

[Corndogger]

Originally Posted by geotag277

Truly a breathlessly stunning retort. I believe this reply single handedly qualifies you to write financial reporting for Forbes.

Looks like I was very effective in my reply. Yours on the other hand...just more word puke.

[casper]

Originally Posted by geotag277

The reason the comparison is stupid is because Amazon is built from the ground up as a cloud "product as a service" company. Microsoft is a dinosaur attempting to enter the cloud market.

Many of Amazon's traditional revenue streams, including marketplace, fulfilment by amazon, and related services - are essentially cloud based "product as a service" offerings. They account for 30+ billion in revenue, and are growing year over year at a amount larger than the entire Microsoft cloud "IaaS" business.

Including Office 365 in Microsoft's "cloud" bucket and not including Amazon's "PaaS" offerings is absurd. As is much of this commentary on how Microsoft is on the precipice of overtaking Amazon in any reasonable shape in this space. People outside technology continue to not have a clue.

Well, no Amazon was not built from the ground up as a cloud "product as a service" company. They were built from the ground up as an on-line bookstore. Basically the equivalent of Chapters in Canada.

Over time Amazon expanded into selling other stuff, like candles and home decorations. They basically became the same an Indigo. Then they started to sell electronics and became like BestBuy. and on and on.

At some point they had all of these big data centres and said how can we make money from these given we are spending a lot of money to built and operate them. They then started to compete with Rackforce and Rackspace and Peer1 etc.

They saw an opportunity to do the same thing as netflix and started to deliver streaming video on line

Yes, Amazon is massive, they are growing at an incredible rate. However they are not revolutionary. Some of these old dinosaurs will give them a run for their money.

Back to the original topic. Amazon HQ2 is not coming to Canada. Vancouver and Toronto will also have a big Amazon presence. However, we should also focus on the competition to Amazon and trying to ensure they come to Canada.

[geotag277]

Originally Posted by casper

Well, no Amazon was not built from the ground up as a cloud "product as a service" company. They were built from the ground up as an on-line bookstore. Basically the equivalent of Chapters in Canada.

Over time Amazon expanded into selling other stuff, like candles and home decorations. They basically became the same an Indigo. Then they started to sell electronics and became like BestBuy. and on and on.

At some point they had all of these big data centres and said how can we make money from these given we are spending a lot of money to built and operate them. They then started to compete with Rackforce and Rackspace and Peer1 etc.

They saw an opportunity to do the same thing as netflix and started to deliver streaming video on line

Yes, Amazon is massive, they are growing at an incredible rate. However they are not revolutionary. Some of these old dinosaurs will give them a run for their money.

Back to the original topic. Amazon HQ2 is not coming to Canada. Vancouver and Toronto will also have a big Amazon presence. However, we should also focus on the competition to Amazon and trying to ensure they come to Canada.

This is an absurd historical revisionist account of how Amazon was built. Really what I would expect from someone outside of technology to pull out of their behind regarding a fake history of one of the largest most successful technology companies this world has ever seen.

Amazon wasn't built analogous to Chapters, they were built from the ground up as a technology platform for online sales. There is a reason Amazon is called Amazon - the longest largest river in the world - it was never about books. Books were the incidental high margin business ripe for competition that Amazon used to leverage their technology business. Amazon pioneered software as a service decades before that was a buzzword. Perhaps you don't know, but Target (the Walmart competitor) was using Amazon as a web service platform for their online business as far back as 2001, for ten years. While building their pioneering software as a service model, they were able to expand their reach and compete and eat ebay's lunch along the way.

Things like AWS and Amazon's infrastructure as a service are simply organic developments of Amazon's philosophy of building technology platforms. Here is an enlightening exposé from a former Amazon engineer who went to Google who describes in intimate detail the ways in which Amazon absolutely slaughters Google when it comes to building technology platforms. If you want to begin to understand Amazon as a company, I would start there.

You simply and frankly don't understand technology companies. You don't understand how to read a company's DNA. To equate a dinosaur like Chapters selling books in brick and mortar locations (who, by the way, continually negotiated a protectionist monopoly to fuel their business along the way) with a company like Amazon who was built from the ground up on technology platforms, is absurd. Even Microsoft is a dinosaur compared to Amazon - which in no small part is evident in the fact Microsoft has to inorganically invest billions of dollars in things like search engines and infrastructure as a service platforms while by contrast these initiatives arise naturally from Amazon's technology culture.

[casper]

Originally Posted by geotag277

This is an absurd historical revisionist account of how Amazon was built. Really what I would expect from someone outside of technology to pull out of their behind regarding a fake history of one of the largest most successful technology companies this world has ever seen.

Amazon wasn't built analogous to Chapters, they were built from the ground up as a technology platform for online sales. There is a reason Amazon is called Amazon - the longest largest river in the world - it was never about books. Books were the incidental high margin business ripe for competition that Amazon used to leverage their technology business. Amazon pioneered software as a service decades before that was a buzzword. Perhaps you don't know, but Target (the Walmart competitor) was using Amazon as a web service platform for their online business as far back as 2001, for ten years. While building their pioneering software as a service model, they were able to expand their reach and compete and eat ebay's lunch along the way.

Things like AWS and Amazon's infrastructure as a service are simply organic developments of Amazon's philosophy of building technology platforms. Here is an enlightening exposé from a former Amazon engineer who went to Google who describes in intimate detail the ways in which Amazon absolutely slaughters Google when it comes to building technology platforms. If you want to begin to understand Amazon as a company, I would start there.

You simply and frankly don't understand technology companies. You don't understand how to read a company's DNA. To equate a dinosaur like Chapters selling books in brick and mortar locations (who, by the way, continually negotiated a protectionist monopoly to fuel their business along the way) with a company like Amazon who was built from the ground up on technology platforms, is absurd. Even Microsoft is a dinosaur compared to Amazon - which in no small part is evident in the fact Microsoft has to inorganically invest billions of dollars in things like search engines and infrastructure as a service platforms while by contrast these initiatives arise naturally from Amazon's technology culture.

First off you have no idea what industry I work in. Your making an interesting assumption.

Indigo (the parent company of Chapters and Coles) has what $1 Billion in sales. With 6,500 employees. They have been selling booking online in Canada as long if not longer than Amazon. Amazon has not made them extinct. Maybe they know something about selling books.

If you need quotes for where the term Amazon comes from, here is one from another book: https://books.google.ca/books?id=Nz4...page&q&f=false

The story I have heard from multiple sources it was originally called "Amazon" because it started with the letter A so it would appear at the top of the list of online listing for book sellers and that because Amazon was the biggest river the founder wanted to have the biggest book store.

He had the biggest online book store by doing what many retails are now calling infinite shelf, where you list product that is stocked by the wholesale and when you do a sale you send a little EDI message over to the wholesaler to drop shit them thing or send it your warehouse. Again not something particularly unique to Amazon these days.

Yes Indigo/Chapters and Amazon had different starts. One was an traditional retailer that went online and the other was an online retailer that is now adding physical stores.

As far as Infrastructure as a Service goes what is so spectacular about AWS? Anyone with money can go buy a data centre full of servers. Go down load OpenStack, deploy it on the cluster. Add some billing/accounting software around it and they have the equivalent solution to Amazon AWS.

As far as search engines go, the large retailers I know all run Elastic search. Again an open source search engine.

Even the hardware specs for building out these data centre is publically available: http://opencompute.org/

Rackspace was founded in 1998. So they have been doing this for 20 years. They generate $1,7 B US in sales per year.

What Amazon has going for it is being nimble, trying to make this work on a small scale, get customers and then building from their. Business have been doing that for decades. They have been very good and taking something they do and leverage it into other areas. They are all over the place, something investors normally hate.

As for the Software as a Service business model. It existed as a business model for decades in certain industries. The airline industry is a good example. Companies like Sabre have offered airlines cloud based airline reservation systems going back to the 60s. What has been new is extending it to make it as wide spread as it is now.

Do not get me wrong, Amazon has managed to be very successful and they will like put some of these Dinosaurs out of business (like Sears). However many but not all of these Dinosaurs are going to evolve and be successful.

My point is it is silly to focus on trying to attract Amazon to Canadian cities at the expense of all the competitors.

[Pinion]

Vancouver's bid is now public. Highlights include Vancouver bragging about how poorly tech workers are paid, worst on the continent.

http://www.vancouvereconomic.com/amazonhq2/

[J.OT13]

Wait wait, as in Hey Amazon! Come to Vancouver, where we have the cheapest labour and highest cost of living? That doesn't sound right.

[saffronleaf]

Originally Posted by Pinion

Vancouver's bid is now public. Highlights include Vancouver bragging about how poorly tech workers are paid, worst on the continent.

http://www.vancouvereconomic.com/amazonhq2/

It's true though... Higher end tech workers in Canada are paid a fraction of what they could earn in the US.

[J.OT13]

But then it's harder to attract talent. Pile on the high taxes...

[TorontoDrew]

Originally Posted by J.OT13

Wait wait, as in Hey Amazon! Come to Vancouver, where we have the cheapest labour and highest cost of living? That doesn't sound right.

That's why I live and work in Toronto and not Vancouver. There are always job posting for my line of work but the pay is the same or less then in Toronto but the cost of living is higher. If the pay was better and cost of living not as high I'd consider moving there.

[geotag277]

I mentioned in the other thread but Toronto also played up their low wages.

https://s3.ca-central-1.amazonaws.co...nHQ2RFP_PD.pdf

Amazon can access our talent at a fraction of the wage cost compared to any other top tech market in North America.

Page 39.

[LeftCoaster]

It's the single biggest driver of tech expansion in the country, ahead of even immigration policies.

We may not like it, but of course they're going to mention it.

[WhipperSnapper]

immigration policy and lower pay are intertwined