[woeirua]

The proliferation of half-baked services at AWS needs to end. There are way too many services that are just enticing enough to get you to play around with it, but then you realize it's totally crippled and unusable for most actual workflows, or that someone else already does it way better. They need to focus on a few that are commercially viable and let other companies prove out the rest.

[jedberg]

I've always said AWS is the master of the 80% solution. They make a product that gets you most of the way there.

The reason they can get away with this is because your data is already at AWS. It's a lot easier to use a new service if the data you need is already there.

That's their advantage. That's where the real lock in comes from. Not from you using their services, but from you keeping your data there.

[woeirua]

Most of the competing services are built on AWS anyways, so it's not like there's big problem switching back and forth...

[hardwaresofton]

This seems to be a large part of the business model though. A platform play only needs to get you in the door and hooked on the almost-great bit of the platform you needed.

They win when the first comment in any technical-requirements-finding session is "well AWS has <X>... that could work?".

New companies choose AWS almost by default these days, and the alphabet soup of services available means that it's got an answer for just about any paradigm you're interested in, which means there's no reason to leave.

The proliferation of half-baked services at AWS will never end. They won't become fully baked either, because that doesn't make business sense -- doing just enough to capture new business is most efficient, and in the worst case just let some partner build on your platform and offer their services.

[ponker]

A lot of people would rather use 20 mediocre products from one vendor than 20 fantastic products from different vendors. I’m like this with Target —- I don’t want to go to multiple stores so I limit my household items to things that Target sells.

[joecot]

There are plenty of companies thoroughly locked in to AWS infrastructure. They don't need to lure in new companies with these services (though the wide variety helps). The point is to get companies already locked in to start using these services and lock themselves in more, so they have even more difficulty ever leaving.

[loosescrews]

There are other cloud providers, some of which are trying the fewer, higher quality services strategy. You can choose one of them if you prefer their offerings. If your answer is that they are missing some niche feature that you need, then I think you found out why AWS' strategy is working.

[jgalt212]

No kidding, when I met with an AWS salesperson, I joked that AWS had more services than there are nouns in the dictionary. He quickly rattled off the current grand total of services, but would not make an attempt at listing them all.

[tanilama]

I mean this also depends on pricing. If they are cheap, then there is a place for them to exist.

But I agree, too much stuff under the AWS umbrella, and trivial ones like this, will impact the brand image.

[jcun4128]

I saw they have this satellite ground station service, I wonder what that would actually allow you to do.