Amazon Beats Out Google as Best Cloud Provider
eweek.com
eweek.com
Amazon aggressively opened up their architecture to the community as a key business strategy. I remember well all the clueless reporters interviewing Bezos and constantly looking befuddled at why he would do such a thing. Now it seems obvious.
Google has arguably even greater architecture, but they keep it under tight wraps. I can see why - they probably don't want to risk losing focus on their key revenue streams.
That's one of the key differences between Amazon and Google. Amazon seems to be incredibly good at diversifying their revenue streams without losing focus. Amazon launches new services and, for the most part, they take off and flourish. Google does a few key things really really amazingly well, but I've often seen their acquisitions/pet-projects die from neglect.
Sometimes I wonder if those differences are because of the way the companies are organized. Amazon seems more of a benevolent oligarchy, and Google seems more of a developers-paradise-soup.
I'm sure there are other factors at work - which are the most relevant?
The thing is in 5 years, when the price of the whole current Amazon infrastructure will cost $10000/month, Amazon will be left with ... lot's of AMI's (apart from original Amazon.com business).
And Google will have list of everyone's attention data, searches, video watching, mails, readers, pictures, news interests just to begin with.
As various GAE applications will gain popularity, those applications will use Google Accounts for authentication, well some of them at least, and 90 percent of your web traffic will go through Google. Now they can start REAL targeting.
Even though, acquisition cost for infrastructure may drastically come down further, operational costs may not. And AWS still may continue to do business.
I agree that having user's data with you is of more strategical value than providing pure platform services for computing and stuff.
who designed appengine. it is poor. they should stop trying to host the entire thing and provide low level APIs like amazon does w/ S3 and SQS.