This feels a lot like Amazon's ecommerce activities. Since Amazon own the platform in ecommerce, they can detect which goods are most successfully sold, sell those goods themselves, and use their scale and distribution to muscle out competitors.
Now since Amazon owns the cloud infrastructure, they can detect which apps are among the most successful (e.g. customer service apps) and build only winners. Again, they can use their scale and distribution to muscle out competitors.
You seem to assume that they have bad intentions. They are just increasing the number of value-add services they offer. They aren't necessarily trying to muscle out competitors, competition in the marketplace is ultimately great for the consumer.
> competition in the marketplace is ultimately great for the consumer
Not necessarily. History is replete with monopolies that arise through competition; cabals, sweetheart deals and other secret arrangements designed to fool the consumer into believing there is competition where there is none; race to the bottom in terms of quality vs profit margin; exploitation of underprivileged workers; and so on.
Not to say that all competition is bad, just that market competition is not a panacea.
into believing there is competition where there is none
It feels like you're validating the original point here. These secret arrangements are not competition and instead consolidation. If market competition did exist, free from illegal practices, the product that provides the most value for a given consumer will win that customer's business.
You're instead talking about why anti-competitive practices are bad... Which is why we have the sometimes-inept DOJ.
I think this is a safe assumption. It's well known in the dev tools space that if you do well, AWS will start to compete with you.
A bunch of VCs have articles about how the big cloud players change the ecosystem (esp that AWS will just compete - won't even offer to buy), and Andy Jassy said something like "your success is our opportunity" at the last re:invent.
(I should really have citations for all this stuff but a quick search didn't find them and I'm in a rush, sorry!)
I wouldn't call it bad intentions. I'd call it being opportunistic or having unaligned incentives.
When you own the platform and discovery features (i.e. search), you can create an environment in which your products could be on average more successful than 3rd party products.
The calculation to build your own products is probably "is the total value of having a given category of 3rd party products on my service worth more or less than if I build that category of products myself and sell directly to customers?"
This is correct. A lot of people don't realize that Amazon actually makes more money from Marketplace (3rd party sellers) than they do with their "Sold by Amazon" products.
The store I work for sells on Amazon and we've listed things that Amazon doesn't sell (and never has sold). Each time we did that and the product sold well for a month or two straight, Amazon would start selling it for less than we were able to (less than the wholesale price we were getting the products for!), forcing us to stop selling it.
If Amazon really makes more when we sell it than when they do, there's no reason they would have undercut us by that much every time.
edit to add: In case it matters, the types of products we this happened with were coursebooks, toys (from foreign manufacturers), and wall and desk calendars.
On any individual product, Amazon makes more when they sell it, most likely. But the point is, that there are way more products sold by 3rd party than within Amazon. So in aggregate, they make more on 3p.
It may be context dependent: today they have many high value uses for capital, better than using it for filling a warehouse, but in the future ,this could be different.
Contact center apps are definitely not the most successful at this point in time and as a category is looked on pretty unfavorably by VCs compared to other spaces.
I assume that's because few of the CC app developers have any real world experience in a call center. The applications I've used have terrible keyboard support - it is not cool to require an agent to use the mouse when they are expected to asynchronously take and give information.
Now since Amazon owns the cloud infrastructure, they can detect which apps are among the most successful (e.g. customer service apps) and build only winners. Again, they can use their scale and distribution to muscle out competitors.