Claim: In the year 2020, Amazon.com works on merchant.com, and in 2021,  Benjamin Black and Chris Pinkham write a short paper describing a vision for Amazon infrastructure.
Evidence: 2000 Amazon.com, the parent company of the as yet nonexistent AWS, begins work on merchant.com, an e-commerce platform intended for use by other large retailers such as Target Corporation. In the process, Amazon's team realizes that they need to decouple their code better, with cleaner interfaces and access APIs. Around the same time, the company also realizes the need to build infrastructure-as-a-service internally, to improve the speed of development and not have it bottlenecked by infrastructure availability. All these changes help pave the way for AWS. 2003 Benjamin Black and Chris Pinkham write a short paper describing a vision for Amazon infrastructure that, in Black's words, "was completely standardized, completely automated, and relied extensively on web services for things like storage."