William Carleton, Counselor @ Law

Amazon and Google spar over cloud services talent

While I've been distracted trying to catch up on the fight in California between Zynga and Kixeye over management talent, Amazon has brought a similar case in my own Seattle backyard. Amazon is seeking to hamper what a former AWS sales exec may do for Google.

The Amazon suit seems to have come to a head. Geekwire reported last week that the federal judge in the Amazon case has issued a preliminary injunction, an order restraining the ex-Amazon employee from soliciting Amazon customers.

Now that sounds like a win for Amazon, but it's not really. The judge limited the duration of the court's restriction to the length of a contractual restriction that Google itself put on the executive when Google hired him.

Geekwire's report put the Amazon case on my radar and Todd Bishop's policy of posting links to primary source documents gave me a chance to look at the judge's order.

Check out the guest post I wrote for Geekwire to sum up what I found. It's titled Legal lessons from Amazon’s ‘noncompete’ battle with Google and has just been posted.

Happy new year everyone! I am so thankful for your support, your engagement, your passion. JLM's exhortation in the thread on Saturday's post will be my motto for 2013!

DIY book reviews

The NYTimes reports that Amazon is changing out how it filters book reviews.

The changes seem to be directed at curbing reviews that are posted by family and friends. Amazon knows a lot about how people are related, broadly speaking. So I'll bet their new filters are effective.

But some reviewers and those reviewed are upset to find previously posted reviews no longer on Amazon's site.

The objections ring hollow to me.

I'm not shy about suggesting that a private network can become so important to public discourse, it should be run as a public commons. For instance, I've advocated in the past that the Gates Foundation should buy Twitter and run it as a global utility.

But Amazon has always been a store and has always been understood as such. The social aspects of the site - telling you what you might like to buy - are all centered around making additional sales. That Amazon does so in a way that makes shopping easier, without seeming to "hard sell," speaks well of how the company strikes the balance.

Getting rid of shill reviews is likely a decision being made in the interest of keeping the right tone on the site and maximizing sales.

People who want to be sure to avoid the loss of their reviews should post them elsewhere.

The situation reminds me of something Eric Goldman said on his and Venkat Balasubramani's blog the other day: "There's only one way for users to truly control the fate of their online digital assets, and that's to host all of their content on their own website."

Some smart, influential people already post book reviews on their own website. Bill Gates, the co-founder of Microsoft and the aforementioned Gates Foundation, does this.

I post book reviews under the "books" category on this blog, and also on the system the Seattle Public Library uses. (Here's a sample, a thread on the new Ian McEwan novel, Sweet Tooth, which I also posted about, twice, on this blog.)

A problem, of course, with having reviews disaggregated across the web is that they can be hard to find. But this need not be that case, not for long. An interim solution might be some kind of River 2 aggregator, pulling RSS feeds of individual book review sites or pages from across the web.

Image: Wikimedia.

AWS marketing event

Monday night this week I went to an AWS meetup in the South Lake Union area.

My ability to navigate and make use of AWS is quite modest. I have a static website on S3 that I use as a personal profile. I also store pictures and serve up some JOBS Act materials and other documents from S3 (though, when it comes to documents I post for linking to from this blog, I often just use Dropbox).

But I want to learn to do more and "self provision" more. This Seattle restaurant list, inspired over the course of an M&A closing celebration dinner, is my latest modest effort.

All by way of saying that the specific information presented at the AWS meetup was beyond me. During the presentation I happened to sit next to a woman I know, an engineer versed in databases, and she understood everything. Part of the discussion was about making sure that the parallel instances you are running of your application are on servers located in different physical locations. She asked a question about pricing that revealed she had already been working with these features.

I'm still working on how to link different pages in a bucket to the index file!

There's a sense of community at these AWS events that I like. Not community in the sense of people who already know each other or live next-door to each other or work in the same building. Community in the sense of shared interest about the frontier of self empowerment.

AWS Senior Evangelist Jeff Barr presenting.

Taking Stock of Amazon

Gotta' admire the Seattle Times for the series they are running on Amazon this week.

Amazon - more so than Microsoft, Starbucks, or the Gates Foundation - is reshaping and energizing the physical infrastructure that is Seattle. Though a corporate no-show in local philanthropic life, the thousands it employs are working and circulating, not in God-forsaken eastside office parks, but in the city.

And the pressure of Amazon's future commitment to develop in downtown Seattle will inure to the benefit of the city's sidewalks, railines and restaurants.

But the Seattle Times, headquartered almost between Amazon's new development site on the north edge of downtown, and Amazon's existing South Lake Union campus, isn't playing hometown booster. It's pursuing Amazon with the kind of classic "accountability journalism" that is supposed to be dead.

One Times story in the series ran photos of an independent publisher in North Carolina, photos that in less than a thousand words signify how small houses dedicated to commodity print have absolutely no chance against Amazon's distributive might.

No doubt the Times itself well knows what it is like to see a business model disappear.

Amazon is roundly criticized in this Times article by publishers who complain about not having any voice to talk to or name to email, when it comes to confronting Amazon's unilateral changes in the discount it requires or in other policies.

No one on the receiving end of sharp news likes to feel anonymous. The publishers being squeezed are probably right to conclude that Amazon does not value them or find them important.

And yet, from a consumer's point of view, transacting with Amazon without human interaction is a plus. If there is one cultural value Amazon is known for and can celebrate as a core competency, it might be self-provisioning.

Here's an idea for publishers who part ways with Amazon and seek their own destiny: accept Amazon's core competence, and differentiate yourself by addressing what de-personalization doesn't.

On the way, get far more literate about how Amazon and web commerce work, technically. As you think of your authors as potential web services, as you find ways to personalize the relationships among your backlist, your authors, your readers, and the habits of reading and writing, you will need to network the pieces, digitally. (You might start using AWS, or its competitors.)

In a phrase, go the opposite direction: as Amazon relentlessly automates, use the tools of information distribution to personalize.

Photo by Oran Viriyincy / Flickr.

Messenger Service

When I started working in a Seattle law firm, 20 years ago now, old timers in corner offices would shout into their speaker phones, "shall I bucky that over to you?" They were referencing the name of a messenger service that, I think, was already out of business. But the name came to stand for the concept. To "bucky" something was to send it by any available same day messenger.  

Flash forward to yesterday, when I remembered a gift that I had forgotten to order and meant to have on hand last night.  

Amazon had it. What's more, for $3.98, they would deliver it to me . . . same day.  

I think it took four hours. Not as fast as your fastest buckier back in the day, perhaps; but then Bucky didn't have to find the needle in the warehouse of inventory, either. Her package was sitting up front at reception.

One curiosity: the package return address (pictured) says Lexington, Kentucky. I took delivery in Seattle. That either out-bucky's Bucky, or the label ain't to be believed.

Simple, Self-Provisioned Website on Amazon S3

There are talented, technical people in my family.

My son Daniel Carleton has been programming since he was 15 or 16. (He learned from some really cool guys at a now super famous tech company, before it became famous.) He makes his living that way and he's super at it.

My two younger brothers are software engineers, too. Mark works for HP/Snapfish, and Tim for a financial services company.

My Dad is not a programmer, but he was into computers when they were still index cards. I wrote a poem in the 1980s about a trip I took with him to NATO in Brussels, where he had a meeting about a computer project he was working on (managing, I think; not coding) that had to do with inventorying parts at airbases around the NATO alliance. "Interoperability," they called it. A word 30 years ahead of its time.

All by way of saying I do not have the technical agility gene. I live inside words, and sometimes I read pictures. I'm from the Arts Quad, and I only crossed the Engineering Campus on my way to the Law School.

Which is why I am thrilled, all out of proportion, to have gotten this site running on Amazon S3.

There's further commentary on the AWS site, which I'm calling Wac6Web, about why I'm doing this.

I didn't learn how to tune automobiles back in the 20th Century. But I want to be more self-provisioning in the 21st.

More Amazon

"Amazon," wrote Brier Dudley yesterday in the Seattle Times, "tends to share about as much information as an introverted teenager, but it's turning 18 this year and finally putting down roots."

He's referring to the news that Amazon is buying three contiguous blocks of urban real estate, situated between downtown and the current Amazon campus in the South Lake Union Neighborhood.

Yesterday was President's Day, which for me means my parking garage downtown was closed, which means I drove around town for twenty minutes looking for free street parking (metered parking is gratis on President's Day). Lo and behold if I didn't end up parking just a block north-west of the reported Amazon purchase. So I checked out the lay of the land and took these photos on the walk into downtown.

This would be the northern-most tip of the new parcel, at the corner of 8th Avenue and Blanchard. I wonder if the tree will survive the construction.

Now looking southwest from 8th Avenue, just before Westlake crosses 8th. On the block to the back of the one in the foreground, between 7th and 6th Aves., is another lot full of cars. The construction on the horizon, south of 6th Ave., must be something besides Amazon.

This is the southernmost block of the parcel. Viewed here from Lenora just south of 7th Ave., one can readily appreciate how the new Amazon campus will abut and effectively extend Seattle's downtown. Pretty exciting!

Twisting your head over your right shoulder from the prior vantage point, or turning about 160 degrees if you'd rather not strain your neck, here is a view of the block bordered by 6th, 7th, Blanchard and Lenora. The King Cat Theatre, current home of Ignite Seattle, is the tan, squat building toward the left of frame. Always good to reference the Space Needle. If you are familiar with the current Amazon-ville, you know the splendid view of the Space Needle from Thomas St., looking west.

Last shot. This is from 6th Ave., just south of the corner of Lenora, looking due north across portions of all three blocks in the parcel. It is a heck of a lot of space.