Walmart Fires Back

It's no big surprise that the retailer titans are at war. Just last week Amazon took a jab at Walmart through the grocery industry - one of Walmart's largest businesses - by purchasing Whole Foods Market Inc. With every step that Walmart takes to maintain market share, Amazon retaliates by attracting Walmart customers. For example, when Walmart started to slash prices in response to Amazon's growing presences, Amazon offered a lower membership fee for individuals with government assistance (a large Wal-mart customer base).

Wal-Mart WMT +1.00% Stores Inc. is telling some technology companies that if they want its business, they can’t run applications for the retailer on Amazon.com Inc.’s AMZN +0.65% leading cloud-computing service, Amazon Web Services, several tech companies say.

Walmart is starting to take direct route and urging other businesses to stop using Amazon services.

Wal-Mart, loath to give any business to Amazon, said it keeps most of its data on its own servers and uses services from emerging AWS competitors, such as Microsoft Corp.’s Azure. The San Mateo, Calif., company had been developing an Azure offering, and “Wal-Mart has expedited our work,” said Mr. Muglia, a former senior Microsoft executive. Snowflake won the business from Wal-Mart’s client."

It's obvious that Microsoft's Azure is benefitting from the feud between Wal-mart and Amazon

An Amazon spokeswoman referred to Wal-Mart’s moves as attempts to “bully” tech suppliers. “Tactics like this are bad for business and customers,” the spokeswoman said.

I think that by no means are we watching Wal-mart experience a downfall, however, I can't help but wonder how the two retail giants plan on co-existing in the future.

• Is Amazon taking over the world? What do you guys think of Amazon's increasing presence?
• Is Wal-marts tactic of making tech companies avoid the use of Amazon cloud servers a right one?