MSFT or AMZN?

[neroden]

But to answer your question I'm a Technical Account Manager. Basically I (and a partner) get assigned to a small handful of enterprise AWS customers, and our goal is to make sure their day to day operations go smoothly. It's a real mish-mash of stuff but a super flexible and fun role. Some days I'm the resident BGP expert for setting up WAN circuits and VPNs (ex Cisco Product Manager), and other days (like today) I'm tinkering with data warehousing and SQL to analyze mountains of customer usage data in an effort to find cost savings opportunities for them.

So you do outsourced IT. Definitely sounds fun.

"Cloud computing" is a hell of a lot less original than I'd been led to believe; the more I learn the more I realize that "cloud computing" really is nothing new, just a buzzword to describe the same old stuff. I guess what's happening is that the rarely-used "best practices" of the early 1990s (I was completely on top of the cutting edge back then, and stopped paying attention sometime later) are finally becoming cheap and therefore standard.

 

[neroden]

You certainly make a lot of assumptions; have fun with your stock picks.

Thank you. I still expect Amazon to do very well, but it's quite clear that I won't notice when they jump the shark (as every business does eventually, after some number of decades), since to notice I'd have to be a business who was contracting with them. So it's not a stock for me.

I appreciate getting enough insight to recognize this. You have given me enough information to be quite sure that I can't stay alert to the state of Amazon's only profitable business. If I were running or involved in a business which used outsourced IT of any sort, I probably could stay alert to it. But I don't. If there were a serious competitor arising or market share collapsed, you'd notice in advance, before the stock price reacted; I wouldn't.

This is a situation where I have to stay out of the stock, but it's probably a great investment for you.

 

[Snapdragon III]

For what it is worth I have no expertise at all on the technical side, but for years I worked in the mechanical contracting industry, and a large part or our work was adding to cooling capacity in server rooms, and tech company facilities. I have worked in the facilities (Not necessarily the large server rooms) of almost every major tech company that has a presence in the Seattle/Redmond area. In terms of the level of Physical security, Amazon facilities were like 3 notches above everybody else. It was a night and day difference. It made it a total pain in the butt to work there, but as an Amazon customer, it made me feel like they were taking keeping my data safe very seriously. I assume that they have the same focus on the technical side as they do on the physical side.