Prime Leverage: How Amazon wields power in the technology world

SEATTLE: Elastic, a software startup 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 use to search and analyze 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 startup by making it easy for people to use the tool with its other offerings. So Elastic added premium features last year and limited what companies like Amazon could do with them. Amazon duplicated many of those features anyway and provided them free.