Amazon met with startups about investing, then launched competing products (wsj.com)

Article summary

Amazon's investing arm met with startups, including one that made a home-video communication device, and later launched competing products. The startups had shared confidential information with Amazon, which the company claims it does not use to build competing products. Some commenters question the ethics of Amazon's behavior, while others defend it as normal business practice. The discussion revolves around the balance between innovation and fairness in business dealings.

Main themes

• business ethics
• innovation and competition
• startup challenges
• data privacy
• market power and antitrust
• corporate culture and values
• fairness and exploitation

What commenters say

• Amazon's investing arm uses confidential information from startups to inform its own product development, potentially unfairly competing with those startups.
• The practice of using confidential information to build competing products is a common and accepted business tactic.
• Amazon's size and market power give it an unfair advantage over smaller startups, allowing it to undercut them on price and drive them out of business.
• Some employees have reported that Amazon does collect and use data from its customers to inform product development, but this data is not necessarily confidential or personally identifiable.
• The use of customer data to inform product development is a key part of Amazon's business model, but it raises concerns about privacy and fairness.
• Startups should be cautious when sharing confidential information with larger companies like Amazon, as they may be at risk of being undercut or copied.
• Amazon's behavior is not necessarily unethical, but rather a natural result of its focus on innovation and customer obsession.
• The line between fair competition and unfair exploitation can be blurry, and different people may have different opinions on where Amazon's behavior falls on this spectrum.