Prime leverage: How Amazon wields power in the technology world

Software start-ups have a phrase for what Amazon is doing to them: Strip-mining innovations

Elastic, a software start-up in Amsterdam, was rapidly building its business and had grown to 100 employees. Then Amazon came along.

In October 2015, Amazon’s cloud computing arm announced it was copying Elastic’s free software tool, which people   to search and analyse data, and would sell it as a paid service. Amazon went ahead even though Elastic’s product, called ElasticSearch, was already available on Amazon.

Within a year, Amazon was generating more money from what Elastic had built than the start-up, by making it easy for people to use the tool with its other offerings. So Elastic added premium features last year