alt Hacker NewsAmazon is only an interface to purchase products made by other companies (except for Kindle devices).
Your alternative interfaces exist and have always existed: Go to a physical store, order by phone, order through the OEM website, order through an Amazon competitor, etc.
"you can already build [Dropbox] yourself quite trivially by getting an FTP account, mounting it locally with curlftpfs, and then using SVN or CVS on the mounted filesystem."
For all the complaints, it's nice to see HN hasn't changed that much.