[dm8]

> - Amazon makes no money, except through AWS. Purchasing Lyft is a significant investment over a a long time, and the money has to come from somewhere. If AWS lags during this critical juncture, this could cripple Amazon hugely.

Did you forget Prime? Then there is Amazon Media Group, A9 etc.

In fact with PrimeNow and AmazonFresh, AMZN gets the readymade footprint of last mile delivery network. Not to mention same network can be utilized for last mile delivery of urgent/priory shipments via Prime/AMZN.

> - And Amazon has no giant cash pile sitting around like Apple. It cannot afford to cannibalize customer trust in AWS when it is imperative to their survival. See: their stock dropping, partly because their growth slowed slightly, and partly because it seems Azure's growth is faster.

Eh, it's just one customer that gets lost due to this (albeit big one). And I doubt Uber is sticking around AWS because of AWS brand, in fact most likely they are sticking around due to combination of tech debt and cheaper deal that they are getting. Why can't they move to GCP (ala Spotify) or Azure if they get better deal there?

[jeromebaek]

The point isn't losing merely Uber; the point is losing trust. Granted this is a competitor talking, here is Satya a few days ago: "No customer wants to be dependent on a provider that sells them technology on one end and competes with them on the other." Uber and Lyft is one of the great tech rival stories of our time. If Amazon comes in and crushes Uber, will any startup trying to make it big want to use AWS?

[dm8]

I co-founded a startup, and lot of my friends work at or run startups. At the end of the day everyone realizes, AWS/GCP/Azure etc. are all infrastructure players. It is given that all big 3 cloud providers will be competing against you in one way or other. And infrastructure becomes a cost center once you start growing. So doesn't matter whether you are competing against them or not. Even Apple uses GCP. At certain scale, the costs questions starts popping up a lot.

>> If Amazon comes in and crushes Uber, will any startup trying to make it big want to use AWS?

Heck yeah! And startups are not the bread and butter of AWS. They are trying to go upstream with enterprise and government contracts that are multi million $$.