Great article, agree with 99% of it. What AWS did better than anyone else is building TONS of software (and it's still doing that at an immense speed) on top of their infrastructure. Everyone else is still too focused on hardware/network etc, while the real advantage of something like AWS, the real disruption are things like Lambda or CloudFormation. I can see Microsoft and Google doing it, getting it but not others at the moment. AWS won the battle with developers: everyone we meet, everyone is building software today, loves AWS. Just a coincidence? That's something you can clearly see everywhere in communities, articles, Reddit, HackerNews. Everyone loves to build software with AWS and that's going to become even bigger with something like Lambda, that is just at the beginning of the serverless age. That's where I think Microsoft and Google will struggle the most, trying to replicate this for developers with their platform. And you are right: documentation for these services still sucks a lot in most cases.
Brushed over Microsoft though. They are the ones closest to having that mythical “appliance” for Enterprise IT. Its calles Azure Stack.
Well, you raise a good point. But my "worry" still stands: nobody, today, would trust a Microsoft appliance in their internal IT.