<i>>"Every time it lays waste to a Blockbuster or a Best Buy, it puts tens (perhaps hundreds) of thousands of people out of work."</i><p>Two companies well-known for bad service and misleading/fraudulent business practices.<p><i>>"For now, businesses that are in competition with Amazon can take comfort in the fact that Amazon is not now (and probably won't be, any time soon) all about customer service."</i><p>Customer service is actually the key reason I keep coming back to Amazon and stopped using terrible businesses like Blockbuster and Best Buy years ago.<p>Everything is hassle free and Amazon has always acted instantly to satisfy me when I've had an issue from returns to stolen packages or streaming video hiccups.<p>Amazon makes it right, the first time, every time. Amazon didn't kill those places, they did it to themselves, years ago.
"This is a company that wants to be the single-source provisioner of both the protons and electrons in your world. It wants to sell you physical books (and other physical goods; the protons) as well as electronic books (electrons)."<p>If your cute metaphor needs explaining, don't use it.
Oh, gah, submissions from assertTrue( ) are showing up on HN's home page again. I've just read the short blog post kindly submitted here by the blog post author, and I don't see any added value from it that wouldn't come from any other review of the book that the blog author recommends. I am not worried about Amazon (but I don't use Amazon cloud services at all).<p>Previous comments about this blog and its editorial practices from other HN readers:<p><a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5196734" rel="nofollow">http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5196734</a><p>by another participant on an earlier article from the same blog:<p>> > It appears you've made some sort of resolution to publish and promote a blog entry per day in 2013. 40 entries in 41 days this year vs. 46 in all of 2012. You should reconsider - whatever your reasons were, I doubt they included a desire to develop a reputation for presenting topics that were sensationalized and thinly researched [1] produced with a pace that ensures discredited theories dont get reviewed.<p>[1] <a href="http://asserttrue.blogspot.com/2013/02/drug-companies-stop-hiding-your-data.html%E3%80%80" rel="nofollow">http://asserttrue.blogspot.com/2013/02/drug-companies-stop-h...</a><p>> Wow, nice spot and they have all been submitted to HN. I have never seen anyone's submission history be so hell bent on self promotion:<p><a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=techdog" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=techdog</a><p>That was followed up by another set of comments:<p><a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5240084" rel="nofollow">http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5240084</a><p>> I'm beginning to flag these posts.<p>I agree.
> No one's suggesting Amazon is actually going to spy on your business's bits and bytes (which are already encrypted anyway, right?) ...<p>I don't get it. If I use the data in any way other than simply storing and retrieving it, I'd expect the decryption keys (ignoring very few situations, in which we are able to compute on encrypted data) to reside on the machines that provide the service, which are posited to be on EC2. So how does encryption protect anything from Amazon?
So basically, Amazon is making new businesses so efficient, they're putting old businesses out of business. So if you're an old business, you should avoid using Amazon's tech to be more like a new business, because...Amazon might someday compete with you and put you out of business? Somehow this does not seem like sound business decision making.
For half a second, I wondered if the link was just going to be one of those novelty sites that just shows a giant "NO".<p>(like <a href="http://hasthelhcdestroyedtheearthyet.com/" rel="nofollow">http://hasthelhcdestroyedtheearthyet.com/</a> )
I've been shocked by the caliber of Amazon's customer service. Pleasantly shocked that is. Also imagine AWS has at least some privacy controls. I find it unlikely Bezos has Netflix's monthly AWS bcced to him in secret.
I was at a meeting a week ago and there was the CTO of amazon.<p>He was speaking about how you could do 'secure and trusted' computations on untrusted platforms, and how your users would definitely be safe when you run your services on AWS, EVEN IF they would be in bed with intelligence community (which he denied). He went on to say how safe AWS was and how it was technically impossible to spy on their customers.
It was at this event: <a href="http://www.dezwijger.nl/86924/nl/amsterdam-connected" rel="nofollow">http://www.dezwijger.nl/86924/nl/amsterdam-connected</a> Not a particularly technical crowd he spoke to, and there was no room for audience questions.<p>He seemed like a genuine peace of shit when it came to respect for privacy and telling the truth.