It's value starts to appear when you are operating at a scale high enough that you start hiring people to futz with servers.

Enterprises love Amazon for a few reasons: - Cost containment -- all costs for a projet can be borne by the project, and go away at the end. - Cost savings -- Amazon costs are easily a third of what large enterprises charge back for similar services. - Avoiding internal IT challenges -- Amazon gives people who own applications or businesses to avoid many of the bureaucratic hoops that they must deal with internally. (Remember the story about the NY Times guy who digitized all of the back issues of the Times? Getting the resources for that project would take months the normal way.) - Speed -- Physical server provisioning times as long as 8 weeks aren't uncommon. VMs can take days. Amazon obviously doesn't have that issue. - Performance isn't an issue -- EBS sucks, but so do the overcommitted VMWare clusters and shared SAN at a large company. At least it doesn't cost $1.50/GB/mo (benchmark cost for enterprise SAN a couple of years ago.)

For a startup that can run the business on a half dozen boxes, it is definitely more expensive. But... if you are expecting lots of growth, you do need to make sure that you choose a colo/hosting place that has the ability to scale up as well.

You made a good argument, made some good points, and you linked to a blog article with real data, so naturally you're getting down voted.

I think its a shame that people apparently fall of the "amazon is a tech company" propaganda. I've worked there. It was like working for walmart. Its not like working for Microsoft (worked there too.) The Amazon hype machine is very strong, but people don't seem to realize it, and the amazon hype isn't strictly honest. (EG: They claimed AWS was "running Amazon.com" at a time when none of Amazon.com was running on AWS. They "leaked" the kindle fire to build hype, and brag about how its selling so well, but never release honest numbers, only bundling the fire with all the other kindles in the few numbers they've released. Lots of puff pieces clearly orchestrated by PR firms trying to paint bezos as a visionary, etc. etc.)

Jerk: Steve Jobs is not a jerk. He's opinionated, and I think many people can't stand that. But at his core, his biggest crime is probably being too honest (e.g.: being honest about what he thinks.) Jeff Bezos: He is a jerk. He's been a jerk to me. For him, being nice is a facade, but in reality, he's got no consideration for other people-- to him other people are ... things to be used for his own benefit. He doesn't have compassion. I believe Jobs has compassion at a very profound level.

Visionary: I don't ilke this term. Steve Jobs though probably does fit, because he focuses on the future, he focuses on the product. He is extremely product focused, product obsessed, and thus he manages to bring about products that have a huge, significant impact. Again, I think Bezos is the opposite. Amazon does hundreds of initiatives each year. The main thing Bezos seems to want out of a product is a press release. I think this is true of even things like AWS. They just throw things on the wall. All of the engineering at Amazon is half assed. (their software was out of date 15 years ago, and is poorly engineered.) They do movie reviews, they do movie show times, they scan restaurant menus, they do a search engine, they have e-readers, now they're competing on tablets, they're a retail operation, they are expanding internationally (yet in many countries outside the USA they haven't done squat because "expanding internationally" played really well on wall street during the dotcom boom but isn't so important now so they don't care so much.)

The only redeeming quality Amazon has is that they treat their customers well (not their employees, not their suppliers, not their partners, not anyone, just customers.) They also had good timing and got into commerce at a brilliant time.

Jeff Bezos is a failed financial analyst who parlayed connections and a lot of dumb money in the dotcom period into the biggest stock scam ever (I think Amazon is still a stock scam-- it has a real business but its stock is massively overvalued and I really don't trust their accounting.)

Here's the proof: Jobs did not seek out publicity for himself, except when he wanted to sell a product. The product was always Apple's latest-- then he'd appear on magazine covers. Bezos is the product, and he, and his PR firm, are pitching him as a visionary-- this is all smoke to get investors to continue to allow Amazon to operate at essentially a loss because its core business is just retailing. Apple is a high tech company that invents totally new technologies-- Amazon is a retailer pretending to be a high tech company.

I have worked for Amazon, but have not worked (as an employee) for Apple, though I have worked with Apple in other capacities.