Comment by swyx
4 years ago
i think the branding "open source Amazon" is just way too ambitious/big. invites a lot of confusion/criticism if Amazon is different things to different people.
4 years ago
i think the branding "open source Amazon" is just way too ambitious/big. invites a lot of confusion/criticism if Amazon is different things to different people.
They previously submitted the same link with a different title and got... 3 upvotes.
The Amazon comparison clearly helped to get on the HN front page.
> Show HN: I'm building an open-source order management system and marketplace API
https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=openship.org
Just goes to show that for all of HN's hyper ad awareness, we still fall for basic click bait in our own territory.
Another way to frame it (from the opposite direction) is a collective failure on "our" part (if there is such a thing as "us") to explore and promote genuinely interesting things just because they lack the sparkle of click bait on the outer surface.
Maybe it isn't that we "fall for" click bait, it's that we very loudly ignore stuff that isn't.
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I think we get excited by big ideas, and things that sound like big ideas. That makes us a great sounding board. On another forums it'd be 'i like amazon, down vote' or 'i don't need that, ignore'.
At least here, we move on perceived merit, however superficial
"Show HN: I'm building an open-source Amazon in Rust" would be even better
I think it’s good marketing.
Amazon’s primary source of revenue is as a market-maker/logisticics provider, so why not position yourself as a competitor if it gets contributors interested?
I had thought until now that Amazon primary revenue stream is running a good chunk of the internet. Quick research tells me, you are right.
Revenue for Amazon is in the retail business. The margin however is a lot better in the AWS side. Warehouses and logistics cost real money to operate.
Amazon to most is primarily a website where you get everything mostly reliable and mostly with a consumer focussed service (I for one never had any issues when returning things, any problem was like "yeah ok, send it back, we send you a new one or do you want a refund?" ... For sellers they play a different game with their market power, discounts or they won't offer your things or rank competitors higher)
should start small, like an open source Google, then work your way up to an open source Amazon.
Nobody ever wants to open source Pornhub. Wide consumer interest, no physical products to worry about, lots of advertising potential - and your not competing with Amazon, Wal-Mart, Google, Apple, or Target. Sounds like a better deal to me.
Constant hassle with payment processors deciding to ban smut once you get too big, though.
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If someone got it to be popular enough, MindGeek would buy it and you'd be back at square one.
Many have already done open source Google and MS. We have those solutions already, and they are great though not yet pervasive. We need open source market place and logistics, and that is where they should stay focused.
Maybe practice creating an open source Microsoft before quitting your day job?
Harsh, but true
literal LOL
For some blissful seconds I thought this post would be related to reforestation efforts.
Probably for this crowd anyway. My first thought at seeing the title was AWS, not the store front.
Also very difficult to compete with Amazon. Amazon makes their operating profits from cloud computing and subsidizes their retail market with it. That is how they keep prices so low.
The result is a form of predatory pricing which should be illegal.
Instead a company should subsidize their product with VC funding like every single company on YC does..
I would be down for an open source AWS services. Shouldn't be to hard to make web front end to the fire cracker instance, but make everything in the backend open source, so any one can run the community edition.
Any thoughts on that?
Yeah, and then you run your "open source AWS" on AWS xD. I believe what you mean it's called Open shift, kind of.