Fujitsu chief disses Amazon’s ‘threatening’ enterprise attack Amazon is a threat to enterprise tech firms like Fujitsu not because of its tech nous but because of its willingness to operate at zero cost to expand its business, the Japanese giant’s president has told The Reg. Masami Yamamoto also said keeping a strong hardware business was essential to the "smartphone to mainframe" vendor …
Amazon's entire business model is to do everything within a hairsbreadth of cost. It minimizes taxable profit, raises the bar for competitors and helps avoid laziness that fat margins can foster. It crushed a lot of bookstores, then retailers, and it's sticking its nose in the IT tent now. They're not perfect, but they do a pretty good job, so get ready for a long series of weaker players to get better or get out (Hello Adobe!)
One cost problem that I'm sure Amazon has not foreseen is the risk they run by offering virtualised desktops as a service. Basically they want companies to provide their staff with Amazon Web Services desktops instead of a real PC at their desk / server room.
The only trouble for Amazon is that a large part of their costs will be electricity. And consumption will be down to what exactly those desktop users do with the machines. And if the users do what most people do it will involve a lot of web browsing, and quite a lot of Googling, So Google will be in control of quite a lot of the CPU cycles that Amazon's virtualised desktops end up running.
So what would happen if, for example, Google's search page started including some heavy weight processing in Javascript (a really fancy Google Doodle perhaps)? That would result in Amazon's electricity bill going up, and to some extent they would be at Google's mercy (because virtualised desktop users are not going to give a damn and be disciplined about shutting down their unused browser tabs, etc).
There's not a lot Amazon could do about it. They could slow down the VM so that it does less CPU cycles per second. But then it would be less responsive and users would start complaining as they walk away from the service. To address this sort of thing properly would mean peering inside the VM to see if it's high CPU usage is purely down to Google's latest front page doodle before dynamically reducing it's clock rate. But that's very invasive, and I'm not sure users would tolerate that either.
If Google offered virtualised desktops as a service (do they?) then they're in an advantageous position. They could selectively deliver less CPU intensive Google Doodles to their desktop users whilst delivering electricity hungry ones everywhere else.
Mr. Yamamoto has to be concerned not only with Amazon expanding rapidly on Fujitsu's turf with software and Services, but with Google and the vast OpenStack and Free/Open Source Software (FOSS) and supporting hardware ecosystem encroaching on their 20th century "mainframe: based non_internet technologies from which they are either loathe to or cannot extricate themselves.
The conservatism and careful steps forward taken by Japanese firms in the past toward technology may have been prudent and admired, but the 21st century has brought forth significant innovation and advancements in technology, particularly in areas like Cloud Computing, social media, Mobile computing, virtualization, enterprise Big Data analytics and vast, internationally dispersed server centers - most all of it based on Open source stands, not the outdated Microsoft hegemony to which Fujitsu seems to bound at the hip.
They cannot be competitive on current antiquated and inflexible base.
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