Amazon enters correction as Trump said to eye tax change

The president has a long history of railing against the way the e-commerce behemoth is taxed. Trump has accused Bezos of using The Washington Post as a tax shelter for Amazon. He has said that if the tech company ever had to pay fair taxes, “its stock would crash.” And he has alleged that Amazon is doing damage to the tax-paying public. He has also claimed that Bezos uses The Post to curry political favor with politicians so he can continue to avoid paying taxes.

During an interview with Fox News last May, Trump suggested Amazon had “a huge antitrust problem.”

.. U.S. Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross said during an interview with FOX Business last August that Amazon had violated no antitrust laws.

Trump Reportedly Wants to Go After Amazon–and Its Stock Tanked

The stock decline came after Axios reported President Donald Trump is “obsessed with Amazon” and has discussed changing Amazon’s tax treatment due to concerns about how the company is impacting mom-and-pop businesses. Axios also reported that Mr. Trump has questioned “if there may be any way to go after Amazon with antitrust or competition law.”

.. It isn’t the first time the company has faced criticism Mr. Trump’s criticism. In December, Mr. Trump called for the U.S. Postal Service to charge Amazon more to deliver its packages.

Ask HN: What happened when Amazon moved into your business?

aspir 21 hours ago [-]

I work for an competitor to an AWS product. We’ve grown rapidly over the past ~7 years in a generally competitive (lots of startups, some really old tough incumbent companies). Without revealing too much on our end, here’s some lessons learned:

* AWS is bad at customer service, even for their large or premium customers. If you position yourself, and _seriously_ invest in making your company’s culture rooted in exceptional customer service, that’s a foothold.

* Don’t compete on price. This is hard for most tech startups, as pricing is a very difficult thing to do properly, but resist the urge to drop price to compete. You’ll never have the scale, the supply chain masterminds, or the financial modeling to compete with AWS on price, so position yourself as a premium or luxury offering and don’t be afraid to price accordingly. If you do the first step properly (a deeply rooted culture of service) you’ll be able to justify the price.

* AWS has great uptime, but often the actual operating performance of their service isn’t that great, especially when you push the products beyond the 80% use case. They know that for the majority of their customer base, best-in-class performance isn’t actually business critical (despite how flashy it sounds). However, there is absolutely a market for people who truly need best in class performance, or product flexibility, or some other best-in-class trait (latency, interaction design, etc.). Find who these people are, and optimize for that ruthlessly. This focus, in combination with the culture of exceptional service and positioning your brand as a premium provider, puts you into a completely different market space than AWS.

.. their API is far more consistent than Azure. Azure has the worst API of all. But their services are much faster than AWS.

.. A good host has a phone number, you ring it, somebody answers and then they fix your problem, without pinging you around a call centre. You’re in and out within 20 minutes.
For AWS (and their class) you submit a ticket and in 4-48 hours, you twiddle your thumbs while the cheapest labour available to Amazon wakes up on the other side of the planet to investigate your problem (also known as walking you through a script).
AWS-sized hosts have advantages but I put a lot of weight in scaling things back to the RackSpace, Linode and Hetzner size operations. They put so much more effort into their human interaction.