> in a normal company salespeople might lose their jobs for saying that.

Quite a few times over my career I have had a salesperson (not from Amazon) recommend a competitor over their own product. In every single case my respect for the salesperson shot way up. In at least two cases I can recall this helped them close a sale.

A smart salesperson does not do everything possible to push their company's products... a smart salesperson solves their customers' problems.

> A smart salesperson does not do everything possible to push their company's products

Bingo. A bad product fit means a bad customer experience, which means a bad review or reputation.

The smaller the company, the more important referrals are from your customers. Sending a potential customer to a competitor will (potentially) earn goodwill and future referrals. At worst, they might not refer anyone your way, but at least they won't be badmouthing you either.

Unfortunately, large companies typically mean large customers, and the people with the buying power aren't the people who will be using the product... so neither party really cares all that much about how well the product fits. This is the old "nobody gets fired for choosing IBM" mentality.

The worst is when medium companies think they are big companies, and try to do that to small customers. I once saw a salesperson push hard for something that was very obviously too small to be worth our time, and the project management overhead would have lead to blowing our potential customer's budget out of the water. In the end, they walked away without working with us, and a pretty sour taste in their mouths from the pushiness of the sales guy.

Yup.

If you look at it from their point of view:

We were making an API that take images does stuff on the GPU and pushes back an answer

It needed to be secure, fast and easy to look after. If they had forced cognito down my throat, and it stopped me from shipping on time, they would have missed out in $$$ of GPU time. I trusted that architect more, because they were honest, and actually helped. Making me want to stay inside the expensive walled garden that is AWS, more.

Also, consider that the key to being successful in enterprise sales is all about relations. When that account rep leaves Amazon, they want to be able to use the relationship they have with you with whatever product they end up selling later.

Amazon doesn’t care what you use as long as you’re staying in their broader ecosystem.

I think it comes down to the “more flies with honey” thing. The customer will go on the defensive and shutdown if you tell them they’re stupid.

Rather they're watching what others do on their platform and then make their own products based on it, same as on Amazon.com

I've also had AWS support go way outside the realm of what they officially support, to help us get the job done. Hell, I've had AWS support people help me debug problems in Terraform when it was pretty apparent that the issue was on the AWS side. "Pretend I'm doing this by hand."

I've had an AWS account manager suggest to me to use Auth0 rather than Cognito for some scenarios as well.