5 years, 1 month and 28 days after S3 is publicly launched. It is just a reminder that the threat by incumbents to startups is hardly worth worrying about.
5 years to clone a product that Google already has the infrastructure for and is within Google's core mission seems excessively long.
Google's mission is "to organize the world‘s information and make it universally accessible and useful."
Gmail helps my company organize our email and communication, and makes it accessible from any computer anywhere in the world.
S3 helps my company organize our information and distribute it around the world.
S3 helps dropbox organize their users information and make it accessible from any device.
An S3 clone is clearly within Google mission.
Google's mission is also to make money, companies make money by focusing on their core strengths. I would rather have Google not clone other people's products, Microsoft did that and they failed over and over again.
S3 may help you organize your information, but that information is probably not public, and if it is then Google's services can access it anyway - they also aren't a charity - if you're looking for charity (i.e. products released for the betterment of the world only) then you need to search for non-profits.
* who, even worse for their case, already had the infrastructure, resources, engineers, etc. to get it done.
The statement should say that startups with innovative, hard-to-reproduce products have nothing to fear; you'll either produce a product that they'll choose not to compete with/can't compete with (Twitter, Facebook) or get bought by them.
How many startups get killed because they can't compete with the big guys, though? Here's an example: http://family.go.com/assets/bubbleshare/
I find glowing reports about it from TechCrunch, then.... nothing, it just dies.
So what happened?
BubbleShare was a Toronto tech darling started by the always brilliant Albert Lai. They were WAY ahead of their time.
All I'm comfortable sharing here is that they received buyout Offer A, which Albert rejected in favour of doubling down for a better deal. Unfortunately fortune did not smile and BubbleShare ultimately accepted Offer B, which was significantly smaller than Offer A.
The site was sold to Kaboose, which is a Canadian family content company. As usually happens when startups are acquired, the key talent left (Albert started Kontagent) and innovation on the site halted.
I'm not an analyst, but these things usually distill down to "too early / too early / too late". I'm not sure that people were ever lining up to pay them money to use the service, and that might give you pause before going down the same road. Many products are cool but aren't solving a problem causing paying customers real pain.