Comments on: Will there be an Amazon of Europe?

By: Observer

Observer — Sat, 01 Dec 2012 09:38:00 +0000

The premise that it is too complicated for Amazon to become a the kind of merchant that they are in the US is flawed.

Google has virtually every single country in the world covered by language and by maps, you have street view in London, Berlin or Moscow.

There is a lack of interest and a lack of willingness to take on the job which is there for the taking, which is the same exact reason why other companies claim piracy is the main reason why they can’t make any money when in reality they aren’t willing to take anyones money that is not in US dollar form and outside of a US zip code.

It would take one office in one EU country to open a European wide internet merchant, all Amazon has to do is unify the EU sites it currently has and only ask you what language you want them in, then let you buy whatever product you want, it doesn’t matter where in Europe it is because it all can be shipped across borders, and just like in the US there are different laws for different states, that doesn’t keep Amazon from selling products one can’t ship to Kentucky but allowed into Ohio.

In the end, they are not interested in the huge market of 400 million that is Europe.

By: ray

ray — Sat, 03 Nov 2012 14:32:39 +0000

We start to have good player in Europe, look, for example at profibricks in Germany or gandi in France. I use both and they are great.

By: jonnylennon

jonnylennon — Fri, 12 Oct 2012 21:50:43 +0000

Innovation will always outpace policy makers abilities to create more policies…. this is only a matter of time…… a self fulling prophecy if you like.

By: mig

mig — Mon, 08 Oct 2012 08:25:24 +0000

Whole heartedly agree with this. US companies and PatriotAct is a very real argument for not using US providers for “in-the-cloud” services.
It is quite backwards to label this as “nationalism”.
US companies, abiding to the Patriot Act, as they must, by US laws, is incompatible with respecting European privacy laws. I even think Europe has been to gentle on letting US companies host cloud services to EU citizens without serious charges.

By: Guest

Guest — Sat, 06 Oct 2012 14:50:34 +0000

Why do you consider protecting your data from the US American “patriot act” nationalism? I call it protecting my rights and my data! The hunger for accessing all sorts of data has gone too far. Today it is not so much hackers to be afraid of – it is governments! It is good to see that people stand up for their rights and companies acknowledge that.

By: David Mytton

David Mytton — Fri, 05 Oct 2012 17:09:00 +0000

I don’t think the constraining factor is the laws or even the diversity of geographic and culture in Europe, I think the real hurdle is to compete with Amazon you really have to provide a whole array of services and not just compute and storage. I’ve commented about this a few times now but I do believe that is Amazon’s key advantage in they provide a whole array of IaaS so you can pretty much run everything on their public cloud if you want. To compete with that is difficult.

I wouldn’t be surprised to see Amazon provide further European points of presence before we see any real competitor arise to challenge the Amazon cloud product portfolio. They already have localised shopping sites for major countries like Germany and France so they must already have data centres there.