Must be kind of funny to look at their accounting reports.
"Thanks everyone for your hard work this week. We're making substantially less money than last week. Let's keep it up people!"
"Thanks everyone for your hard work this week. We're making substantially less money than last week. Let's keep it up people!"
Lower prices != more volume guaranteed, you have to find an equilibrium.
AWS is also a very granular service, so Amazon gets near real-time metrics re: usage, demand, etc for a variety of services. That allows them to analyze changes in usage patterns and correlate price signals to actual consumption of services.
My guess is they adjust their pricing to control growth. Too cheap, and demand will spike, requiring Amazon to grow the environment too quickly. Too expensive, and they'll have trouble making the continuous capital investments that they need to make while still making money!