And they probably should have launched GMail before Hotmail, Search before Altavista, and Adwords before Overture ;-)

Hey even Nokia was not first in phone market, they raise to the top, and look were they are now.

I think the parent post has a valid point. It is harder to enter market now than it was 4 years ago. Not impossible but much much harder.

I disagree. I think it's an easier market to get into - it's a proven market that is about to be commoditised (which is a lot of what Google is about).

No-one needs persuading that they need cloud servers now. If Google can produce a a)better, b)cheaper or even c)different service then they've got customers.

The most valuable customers are either on EC2 or their own private hardware. The number of companies who can trivially port their software to Google's new offering are a small fraction of the total market (when accounting for total $ spent).

There's an even bigger problem as well. Google hurt their reputation as a hosting provider when they significantly raised their rates without advanced notice. Companies want to know what their costs will be, and want to know that someone will answer their questions if they have support issues. Google has a negative reputation in both areas.

And where is Nokia, again? They have lost 95% of their value since they were on top, and while popular in other markets, have essentially abandoned the US.

I don't see that AWS has really "cornered" the market. They're leading because they're better, which is a different thing entirely.

Cloud services like EC2/EBS and (to a lesser extent) S3 are really fungible. It's comparatively easy to move between providers, or even to your own hardware if you want. If someone were to come along and offer a comparably performant and reliable service to AWS at half the price, Amazon's customers would flee like rats. Obviously the devil is in the details, but it seems to me like Google is better positioned to offer that kind of value proposition (c.f. Google Drive, whose retail price is already cheaper than S3) than Microsoft or Rackspace.

Basically: linux boxes are a commodity. You can't compete in this market on features. That makes Amazon's (admittedly) dominant position more precarious than it looks.

Something I think would make a good business is someone selling every "tier" of hosting and making transitions push button simple.

For example, press a button and get dedicated vps hosting for your cloud images, press another button and get dedicated physical hosting, press another button and you buy the hardware and switch to a colo relationship, press another button and you get your physical hardware overnighted to anywhere.

This. I want to pay someone for it.

If the big players (hi, Amazon) don't do it, then set up IaaS as a Service:

• Push a button and my cloud images move from Amazon to Microsoft Azure to whatever Google's thing is (since that's ostensibly the discussion today). Include RackSpace, Linode, etc. as well for bonus points.

• Pay the bills for me. If Amazon won't handle migrating my images, I'll pay you 1% on top to take my money, pay the bills, and manage the change in billing when I switch providers. Here's your chance to advertise when you negotiate better deals with a competitor: show me how much money I could be saving.

• If I push the button, and there are really obvious things about my cloud images that won't work where I'm going - i.e. things you've tried to move and it didn't work for somebody else - detect that and say "nope, here's what you need to fix." It's not going to catch everything, but kind of like a virus database it should be constantly updated as you hit problems.

• I'm not asking you to do the migration for free. Well, if I want a free migration, I have to accept that it won't transfer perfectly and I'll have to debug it. Or, I can pay you an hourly rate to do the migration and set up a test environment on the new platform, and identify any problems.

I wish somebody would do that.

I think you may be under the misunderstanding that AWS = EC2/S3. It isn't.

AWS also includes SQS, IAM, SWF, SimpleDB, DynamoDB etc all of which are proprietary with very Amazon specific APIs. As each new developer starts to use these it "locks" them into the platform as a whole. And since many of these are core services I just don't see customers moving to a competitor unless there is a massive difference in price/features.

Also don't forget: NOBODY offers the complete range of unified services that AWS does right now AFAIK.

No, AWS == EC2/EBS/S3. Period.

That's where the money is. Yes, Amazon offers that other stuff. I'm sure someone buys it. I refuse to believe it's a significant fraction of AWS revenue without evidence. Huge numbers of successful sites are built on the core stuff. Are any large sites using the Amazon lock-in features? I'm certainly not aware of any.

I agree that EC2/S3 is where Amazon makes its money and I doubt any large site is using the other features. The services are new and are specialized in nature.

But people ARE starting to look at them and it is an area (PaaS) that is going to become more and more compelling for businesses in the future. And Amazon is right now is the only player I know of in that space. And every new user they attract could well be locked in for life.

But I think you're missing the point. Google App Engine (and Heroku for that matter) is a PaaS product. They were there first, and they lost to the commodity metaphor. You can argue that Amazon will succeed based on the quality of their offering, I guess, but not simply because it's "PaaS". The market has spoken, they don't like that.

PaaS hasn't lost - it's just a smaller market than IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service), and it will take longer to become mature.

IaaS is immediately useful to anyone who needs a Linux box. PaaS needs longer lead times for people to adapt to a new platform.

Amazon's approach to the PaaS market is probably a lot better than Google's.

Google went: here's a new set of APIs, write custom apps to use them.

Amazon let you host standard LAMP apps, and then slowly started offering parts of the stack as a service (oh, you need a database? Here, use our managed one. You need search? We have that. Load balancing? Just use ours, it's easier than doing it yourself.)

Except when you say "AWS has cornered the market", you actually mean "EC2 and S3 have cornered the cloud VM and blob storage markets". Every other AWS service has a ways to go before it can claim to have cornered anything.

No. I think of AWS now as a PaaS and whilst it is a tiny market it is a growth one and Amazon is the big fish. There are lots of companies offering database/search engine/queues as a service but none that offer all of them integrated under a unified security model.

Before I believe your "big fish" theory you'll have to show me numbers or some sort of convincing anecdotical evidence. Every day I see overwhelming evidence from my work that EC2 and S3 are widely adopted in the tech startup community. RDS is a very, very, very distant third. Everything else (beanstalk, elasticache, elastic map reduce...) is not even a blip on my radar.

I think elastic load balancing is widely adopted.

I don't think ELB is the kind of thing you'd want to use if you weren't on AWS. It's only because they don't do better load balancing or let you build your own (with multiple IPs per box) that you use ELB.

Same with DynamoDB: the only reason I'd use it is because EC2 instances don't come with SSDs. Otherwise, meh.

Right, just a trivial matter of engineering right? ;)

Amazon has a unique advantage here because the systems and technologies needed to run the retail website are very much identical to what's needed to serve up a commercially viable PaaS offering to the public. So much so that amazon is moving rapidly toward self-hosting the web store on aws (a lot of it is already on aws today).

In contrast the way google runs their own services is very different (though in some ways more advanced) and not generally suitable to morphing into commercial cloud services, so they don't have that self-hosting advantage. They certainly have the know how to put out a decent offering though, especially now that the market has spoken so clearly on exactly what it wants.

It goes deeper than that. They've been working on Service-Oriented Architecture for over a decade. I think I heard that Monkeybagel was a satire of Amazon's SOA push.

http://monkeybagel.com/monkeybagel.html

Nah--I wrote that about Amazon's initial design for an internal-only enterprise backup system, which was created by an MBA and given to me to make happen. (I scrapped it in favor of hiring someone who knew how to do it).

Thanks for taking the trouble to come over here and correct me.

Monkeybagel was great. I laughed pretty hard at it when it came out.

I would love to have someone talk my ear off about the technology behind google's SOA. I have a little bit of experience in the area and the different solutions people come up with for the problems are fascinating.

Waiting for a market to mature before entering isn't the end of the world. As far as "cornering" a market goes, Wikipedia's example is perfect: "Large companies, such as Wal-Mart or Microsoft, are considered to have cornered their markets." Sure, those companies have a substantial base, but that doesn't mean their isn't plenty of room for competitors who can do very well (Target & Apple).

Google has enough resources to enter a market like this and have some instant credibility. We've seen it with Gmail, Google Maps, and many of their other services.

None of companies you mentioned have cornered any market.

Dropbox may be popular but it's still not mainstream.

Heroku's market is still very young.

AWS is probably used by just half of the startups I know. But Linode & Rackspace are pretty big too.

Linode and Rackspace are nothing more than commodity Linux box providers with some related services.

AWS is morphing very quickly into a true end to end PaaS. Big difference. And it's hard to see who can compete with them.

The parent post is about VMs not end-to-end PaaS.

With other aspects of PaaS, Amazon is still gaining ground. SendGrid is probably the leader in mail services.

The market as a whole is still very young. It's very short-sighted to say that Google won't be able to compete with Amazon. And besides, do you actually have full knowledge of what Google is going to release?

In my opinion a digital market is never "cornered", Google simply doesn't know how to improve over those competitors, and how to provide users with a good enough reason to switch. If Google knows its clear that its current organization doesn't allow to pursue the right choices in some areas, and you can notice by looking at several recent "flops" (boutiques.com, g+,...) .

You can have all the money in the world and all the world class runners you want, but your team will still lose if you run even just on a slightly wrong track.

The GAE and Maps price hikes were an odd decision. I'm not sure why they decided to do that.