I'm sorry, but this just isn't true. The very first product launched under the AWS banner was S3, which was fundamentally different than anything else on the market. There were tons of companies offering shared and VPS hosting, but nobody offering an API-driven, usage-billed storage service like S3.

A few months later they launched EC2, which was absolutely comparable to the various VPS hosts (if differentiated somewhat by its API-driven use model). But S3 was first, and it made a loud and clear statement that AWS was aiming to build something unlike anything else on the market at the time.