Ben Gilbert: belief

Transcript context

…It's crazy that AWS did not do this. It's probably AWS's biggest failure, and the question is, why? I think there are a few areas. One is just big company stuff. I think before launching something when you're at Amazon's scale, and now that they are the trusted partner of all these IT departments, you've got these security things, operational things, SLA guarantees that they're fully committed to. I think it hamstrings your ability to really streamline a product, be opinionated, and get something to market that's both fast, intuitive, and built for the user. I think Redshift requires a lot of customization, whereas Snowflake is awesome for developers out of the box. It's funny that the playbook that Snowflake ran is pretty similar to the playbook that AWS ran when they were just S3 and EC2 serving individual developers. There's a little bit of, they're a victim of their own success on this front. The other one, Ben Thompson pointed this out in a piece that we'll link to in the show notes. It's right there in the name, they're fighting Oracle. They're fighting the last battle with Redshift. It's, hey, take your Oracle-style data warehouse and basically do that in the cloud, rather than lots and lots of Snowflake customers never would have become Oracle customers. It was a different customer segment with a different set of needs. It's just a fantastic product. That's not really who Amazon was serving. There's new leadership there now, they're getting the house in order, and I think they recognize this, but this was a whiff. Probably not a whiff on the order of...…

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