As a big and long time user of AWS I thought it was pretty obvious that SimpleDB was deprecated when DynamoDB came out, and am surprised you think it is somehow bad to maintain a service in a "zombie" state is somehow worse than killing it... the way AWS plays this allows customers using the service to decide to move to a new service because it is better or cheaper, and on their own time scale (!), rather than being forced to drop everything else they are doing to go back to some old project and plan a migration.

I am so sick of companies thinking "a year (or even two!) to migrate is long enough for anyone": do you realize how many services I use? Do you realize how many random products I have built? If every service deprecates their API once every five years and gives everyone two years to update, and you use 20 services (this is common!), that means that every few months you are having to go back through all of your projects you have ever built to rewrite them against some new API. That is absolutely insane.