The bottom line is always about money. What's the money here? It's not the money made from hosting, it's all about the P/E. Tech companies have high P/E ratios. Retailers do not. Amazon is a retailer whose most successful product has been its own stock. It has developed a skill in the art of propaganda to make it seem like it's a tech company. The amazon Drone April Fools Hoax (that people actually believe is real) is an example of this. They are working really hard to create the perception that they are innovative so their multiple can remain high.

I flagged this article because it is pure propaganda, self serving and right out of the mouths of Amazon's PR staff. This is how they operate. This is how a retailer whose management has no understanding of technology and who abuses their engineers is made to be perceived as a "tech company". They have been engaging in wall to wall propaganda for the past 10 years, using techniques pioneered (and possible the same PR firms) by Microsoft when they wanted to change Bill Gates from the perception that he was evil incarnate into the perception that he was a good guy. (Which worked amazingly well. People seem to have forgotten how he set back technology 10-20 years. Hell, 20 year olds today were just being born during the height of his reign of terror.)

If this story about Sun is true, it shows just how much damage the US government does to the economy with "regulation". But since there rest of the article is nonsense who knows.

The claim that Amazon has a 7 year headstart is nonsense. The claim that Amazon "turned cloud computing into a mainstream phenomenon" is nonsense.

By the way, Amazon's only service in 2006 was S3. They claimed (it was a lie, and I know this because I worked at Amazon at the time and was amazed at the boldness of the lie when I saw the press release) that S3 used "the same machines that run Amazon.com!" Amazon didn't seek out to build a business with cloud hosting-- this is just another initiative thrown against the wall to see if it would stick. (Remember A9? Remember the literally 100+ businesses they have launched and shuttered over the past decade? The Fire phone is an example of this. They waste a lot of money just building crap to improve their image, make them seem like a "Tech company") S3 was actually innovative-- shows what can happen when management at Amazon takes their eyes off of the ball and lets engineers have a little space. (unusual at that company.)

What amazon is good at is marketing and particularly to the Hacker News crowd, I'm sorry to say. Objectively if you look at AWS it's a bad deal all around. The technology isn't that great, it's terrible when it comes to reliability, and the pricing is not very good either. Further, they lock you into their APIs which means you have to spend a lot of effort to leave. Yet whenever these things are pointed out here on HN, people say "yeah, but who has the time or money to run their own servers!!11!".

As if they was the only alternative, as if there weren't lots of major competitors from Google and Microsoft to Digital Ocean, Rackspace -- which will give you even more high touch services-- and a million mom & pops. Every feature in AWS was offered by somebody, at scale, before Amazon, and usually without a proprietary wrapper around it. In fact, most of this stuff existed in one form or another in the early 1990s.

Amazon only "Dominates" in the minds of the PR flacks who write these articles and the proof is in the first sentence of the next paragraph:
"On April 23, Amazon plans to disclose the numbers for its cloud business for the first time"

This whole thing is a shell game akin to the one Microsoft played in the 1990s where they bought up all the media, and every writer out there whose audience included CIOs and paid them to say that Microsoft had won, that Apple had no market share, and by doing so persistently for several years (much like google is doing now with android) they convinced people that Apple had less than %5 marketshare. This at a time when Apple had %25 market share! This killed many software projects-- I remember being told "there's no market for our application on the mac" during that era by marketing guys who knew nothing of the real stats, only what they read.

Meanwhile people think android is winning based on ZERO sales data, merely a constantly and loudly repeated propaganda making the claim. Apple publishes audited actual sales numbers every quarter. No maker of android phones (that I've found) does so.

If you think android is dominating in sales you're believing propaganda and have no proof, and probably no evidence. (and don't get me started on "activations". At one point Microsoft was "selling" and counting, windows for every mac installed in every school!)

I see the down votes are coming in, I know to expect this because I'm daring to criticize a "major tech company" that's often mentioned along with Facebook, Google, Microsoft and Apple.

But my point is, we should not be so susceptible to propaganda.

This article is just pure propaganda.