Ben Gilbert: evaluation

Transcript context

…Yet they're still at least in inning number, maybe we're in inning number two of the cloud now. They're pretty far and away the leader. It's interesting to think about what could Google have done rather than copying the Microsoft strategy in the mid-2000s of, "Okay. We've got the "operating system", now we're going to do productivity." Why if they had instead fought Amazon more directly at that point on the infrastructure layer, or gone with another aspect entirely? Yeah, it's interesting. I think with Google App Engine, you were locking yourself into Google's proprietary data storage and you had to use Python. When you were looking at the cloud services in inning number one, or the top half, the choices, it wasn't apples to apples at all, because you're like, "Well, I'm going to either build for Google App Engine or I'm not. I don't really get choices around that." or "Amazon, it looks like gives me just one level of abstraction above running my own server, which I think is what I want." It was interesting how those two companies made enormously different bets there, and Amazon now ... You look at the diversity of companies and enterprises and workloads that have adopted Amazon over the past few years. You mentioned Dropbox moving off of Amazon, but for the longest time, Dropbox ... Amazon won the first round of this fight across productivity because everybody used AWS. Dropbox paid the Amazon tax. There's a great Stratechery article which as our listeners know we are both big fans of Ben Thompson, but his article last week on the Amazon tax is just fantastic.…

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