I believe the virtualization they are offering allows the service to scale a bit more like software, but I do agree that these cloud providers don’t have 0 marginal cost.
Either way, thank you for de-buzzwording the original argument. It makes much more sense in English
Interestingly the de-buzzwording of the argument makes sense for the actual thing called "gig economy" too. It could just as well be called the "human rental business".
“Human rental business” absolutely makes whatever economy that is sound much more like the reality these workers live in. We should use it more instead of the euphemisms we all use now.
A similar thing happened with eBay and Amazon: Amazon owned the products they sold (initially anyway) and eBay was pass-thru. Amazon was more successful.
So Bezos is currently thinking, how can we own some Amazon humans and provide them for rent?