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I believe that if "storefront" was spun off of AWS, AWS would falter less than a decade.

Having an anchor tenant with "2014" problems in 2010, or "2020" problems in 2015, especially if they roll up to the same CEO as your org, gives the org a huge head start in making software and platforms that will, once 2020 actually rolls around be tremendously compelling to everyone else.

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For what reasons would AWS falter in less than a decade if it were on its own?

Amazon provides AWS with problems to solve that are going to be general problems to solve in 2-3 years. Amazon developed DynamoDB and S3 and handed them off to AWS to operate, for instance.

Without Amazon's innovation funnel, AWS will be Rackspace in 10 years (well, maybe Oracle in 5 years). Maybe they'd keep adding more hosted services (Announcing ClickTower, our columnar database as a service!) but that's not innovation.

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