[dmix]

This is some great content marketing by Taloflow.

Having not paid attention to this story I didn’t realize they chose R because it was one letter behind S in the alphabet.

If Cloudflare was a smaller company they’d probably get sued pretty fast. That has happened for much sillier and vain reasons. But I doubt there’s much to gain via the courts in the current state of things. This seems to be standard price competition that all commodity like products resort to.

[floatingatoll]

If consumers are so likely to confuse "S3" and "R2" that a court would grant trademark enforcement to S3 over this, then Mazda could have successfully sued BMW over the confusion between MX-2 and M3, not to mention the total havoc such a court judgment would wreak upon the SMT labeling industry: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28777350

If Cloudflare had an entire AWS-simulation business and was making a clear effort to confuse customers about being "just like AWS, only not Amazon", then that might be an easier case to win, but Cloudflare seems pretty dead-set on being different than AWS (for example, they offer customer support), so that's unlikely.

Amazon might still sue just as saber-rattling, but that would open them up to a SLAPP countersuit, against a party that has repeatedly demonstrated that it is willing to fund lawyers to punish those abusing the legal system — not to mention being mocked around the world for suing over a two character product name with no shared characters.

[dotancohen]

  > Cloudflare seems pretty dead-set on being different
  > than AWS (for example, they offer customer support

In my experience with problems that I have caused in my AWS environments, AWS has excellent support.

[floatingatoll]

Lucky you! And I've recently had a bad experience with Cloudflare support, but I'm still making my offhand comment, because recently an AWS sales rep told me that the formal support process for one of their enterprise products is, paraphrased, "post to a discussion forum, and if I'm not on vacation, I'll see it and escalate internally to get you support" in as many words. I actually restated it to them to confirm and they paused noticeably before unhappily saying "Yes, that's correct". So it'll be a while before they earn back my respect in that particular regard — I may be upset at receiving poor support one time, but it's still better than not even having a ticketing system available from the other.

[dragonwriter]

AWS has 24/7 phone/email/chat support on the business and enterprise support plans (with severity-based SLAs) with not only a ticketing system but a case management API, and business hours support on their developer support plan. Your sales rep sounds like they just want to maintain control of the relationship.

[samhw]

Yup, I second this. At a past job we needed support for Kafka, and their tech support's advice was so fantastic that it was actually circulated around the company for general reading. We had an entire team of people who were expert in Kafka - including myself - to the point of having given widely viewed talks etc, and we learned a lot from them. I can't rate it highly enough.

That said, it's famous that there's a very big difference between the different tiers of AWS support. When I say 'tier', I just mean in the sense of how far your query gets escalated, though it's possible that only large clients get to be escalated to the very high tiers. (We were worth billions and spent near enough a million a month, so we were at least a t2.large to them.)

[datavirtue]

On Azure you can file a ticket and an engineer will be blowing up your phone in short order. That's on the developer plan. The expensive enterprise planes are the exact same support only faster with a guaranteed SLA.

Azure smokes AWS on docs, community, and support. Just my experience...over and over again.

I'm at a huge high profile company where we have dedicated AWS staff. We have a dedicated email address at AWS to reach them. First time I tried to use the email address I got no reply at all. Took a while to figure out it had changed. I had formed my above-stated opinion long before that whilst trying to use various services and referring to their docs and community to navigate all the undocumented and out of date cruft. This is almost a decade now of the same experience.

[outworlder]

> Azure smokes AWS on docs, community, and support. Just my experience...over and over again.

Great. If only their tech stack was at the same level.

In terms of support (filing tickets) we can generally get on a call with AWS in a matter of minutes. If there's one thing that's annoying, is the status page. We'll often get notified of outages by our account rep way before there's anything in the status page.

[breakingcups]

Not my experience. We're waiting for them to sort out a broken Azure AD B2C instance for over a year.

[floatingatoll]

Circumstances are more complicated than I wish to go into here, but everyone did well at their jobs, so I have no latent upset with anyone over it.

[marcosdumay]

AFAIK, you can describe a product as "just like AWS, only not Amazon" without any problem as long as you are clear enough that it's not Amazon, and that "like" is really "like".

[geoduck14]

IMHO, there is very little risk consumers will confuse Cloudfare for a major Cloud provider

[fomine3]

CloudFront and CloudFlare was confusing for me.

[CRConrad]

> then Mazda could have successfully sued BMW over the confusion between MX-2 and M3

Assuming you mean the MX-3 (I can't find any reference to such a thing as a Mazda MX-2), it would hopefully have been the other way around -- BMW suing Mazda, since the M3 predates the MX-3 by half a decade:

> M3 models have been produced for every generation of 3 Series since the E30 M3 was introduced in 1986. -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BMW_M3

> The Mazda MX-3[4] is a four-seat coupé manufactured and marketed by Mazda, introduced at the Geneva Auto Show in March 1991[5] and marketed for model years 1992–1998. -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mazda_MX-3

[sundvor]

These model numbers are rife, and hardly unique to the brands. If you were to shorten Tesla's Model 3, you'd have the TM3.

And back to Mazda, they have a very successful "3" that _could_ be described as an M3. :)

If anything it's nice that there's some consistency between at least a few brands on the numbering - if you see a 3, you'll know it's likely a medium sized car.

[floatingatoll]

Ugh I looked up MX-2 instead of MX-3, thanks for the correction. The point stands, but it seems lost in the noise due to my off-by-one. Oh well.

[CRConrad]

Sorry, I don't get what you mean? Yes, you were off by one in the model name, writing "MX-2" in stead of "MX-3", but both I and a sibling comment corrected for that, disussing the actually existing MX-3 in stead of the non-existent "MX-2". So what's the "noise" here, in your opinion? It was your actual point that was disproved.

Yes, there is no such thing as a "Mazda MX-2", and never was. I went directly to Wikipedia last time, but that has pretty much every other car model that ever existed, so I saw no reason to believe a "Mazda MX-2" ever existed. And now that I've googled for your exact term, here are most of the top hits:

Speculation from 2009 about a coming new model (possibly for 2013) -- which was sparsely reported even at the time, and apparently never materialised (since no actual specifications, prices, tests, or reviews show up in at least the first five pages of Google results):

https://www.autoexpress.co.uk/mazda/32905/mazda-mx-2-reveale...

https://www.motorauthority.com/news/1033621_mazda-working-on...

https://www.drive.com.au/news/2013-mazda-mx-2-rendered-specu...

https://www.autoevolution.com/news/cgi-2013-mazda-mx-2-8195....

https://www.burlappcar.com/2009/06/mazda-mx2-coming-up.html

https://www.tv2.no/a/12383893/ (in Norwegian)

A few auto trading sites that purport to have pages related to it (my guess: from mistyped searches), but which turn out to contain other models (mostly MX-5's, with the odd Mazda 2 sprinkled in):

https://www.gumtree.com/cars/uk/mazda/mazda+mx+2

https://www.newsnow.co.uk/classifieds/cars-vans-for-sale/maz...

https://cars.trovit.co.uk/used-cars/mazda-mx-2

https://www.ebay-kleinanzeigen.de/s-autos/mazda-mx-2/k0c216 (in German)

And that's it. So, to sum up:

1) There is no "Mazda MX-2", there never was.

2) The only "noise" here was your typo; if you were talking about actually existing cars, you must obviously have meant the MX-3. You were after all talking about model names clashing with the M 3.

3) This was corrected for in the discussion; what was discussed was your actual point, not the "noise" (your typo).

4) If for some incomprehensible reason you actually meant the non-existent "Mazda MX-2", our point against it stands even firmer than with the MX-3: The BMW M3 would have predated the "MX-2", had it materialised in 2013, by 27 years in stead of merely five. If anyone had been able to sue anyone, it would still have been BMW, not Mazda.

So no, your point doesn't stand.

And I'm utterly baffled: Where are you -- still! -- claiming to have "looked up MX-2" from???

[floatingatoll]

Swap which was one first, I meant. It was either M3 or MX. Sounds like it was M3. So, “BMW could have sued Mazda” instead of “Mazda could have sued BMW”, which ultimately has no material effect whatsoever on the point I’m making, since I could have chosen any number of non-BMW, non-Mazda examples there. I’m sorry that you felt compelled to write a page-long proof that BMW was first; no argument here! And I hope you’re enjoying your M3 :)

[CRConrad]

Hah, I wish! (Why didn't you give me an M8 while you were at it? I drive a Tiguan -- the one with a 1.4 l engine. :-)

But you're really not very good at reading, are you? That was not "a page-long proof that BMW was first", it was an at most half-page-long proof that there never was a "Mazda MX2". And you also seem to have missed my question how you still, two days later, claim to have "looked up the MX-2". I've pointed out twice now that there is no such thing, so where did you look that up?

[dorianmariefr]

AWS has customer support

[sokoloff]

Their (paid) Enterprise Support is quite good, in my experience.

[Hamuko]

I've also had good experiences with the paid support when a deployment went horribly wrong. However, the support costs real money so it's back to Google for us. Luckily we're running on EKS now so it's probably easier to diagnose without a paid customer support rep than CodeDeploy.

[geoduck14]

>If Cloudflare had an entire AWS-simulation business and was making a clear effort to confuse customers about being "just like AWS, only not Amazon", then that might be an easier case to win

Well, I'm pretty sure THAT'S not a problem they have to worry about any time soon.

[jen20]

The MX-3 started production in 1991, the M3 started production in 1986, so if anything BMW would have been suing Mazda in this situation ;-)

[rmbyrro]

I also have nothing to complain about AWS paid support

[cronix]

Judge: What does S3 even stand for?

Amazon: Simple Storage Solutions, sir.

Judge: Ok, and what does R2 stand for?

CF: Uhhh....it's one less than S3, sir.

Judge: Ok, and what does R2D2 stand for?

Lucas: Why am I here?

[forgot_old_user]

History rhymes with itself?

"Amazon Web Services reportedly named its cloud database RedShift in order to tweak Oracle"

"RedShift was apparently named very deliberately as a nod to Oracle’ trademark red branding"

https://www.geekwire.com/2018/amazon-web-services-reportedly...

[CobrastanJorji]

Wait until you find out why the giant evil computer is named HAL!

[mellavora]

Ive Been Meaning to make that comment

[human]

Everyone knows it’s fom « Heuristic Algorithm » ;)

[JoBrad]

I thought it was Hardware Abstraction Layer.

[Macha]

As Intel found out when they were unable to stop AMD naming their Intel 486 compatible CPU Am486, there's a certain threshold of creativity a name has to reach for trademark protection.

These short letter/number sequences aren't it.

Smaller companies than Cloudflare have used similar naming for S3 compatible services without issue, see Backblaze B2