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Comment by zitterbewegung | Hacker News Reader

Does anyone else think that they missed the boat? 3-4 years ago there was little competition. Now basically EC2 has most of the market. If they want to be successful they have to be not just cool but noticeably better than EC2 and it doesn't seem like google wins that way.

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I don't know, EC2 isn't that great to begin with and it's pricing is really not impressive at all. The I/O absolutely awful. There probably is room for biggest companies to compete Amazon, especially Google if they take the business seriously.

When Gates and Allen launched Microsoft they thought they were too late, that there were too many other established companies in the market to be able to find a niche for themselves. When google launched web search was half a decade old and dozens of companies were in the market. When apple launched the ipod mp3 players had already been around for years and gone through many generations.

An absence of competition is a near certain way to gain market share, but the easy way is not the only way. If you have a good enough product you can steal business from the competion and even grow the size of the total market (as was the case with the ipod and iphone).

Gates and Allen thought there were too many other established companies in the microcomputer software market?

Not necessarily established companies, but people working on things that would become companies. They thought they were too late and they were pretty close to just going off and doing something else instead.

People still think the same sorts of thoughts today, as we've seen, and they are no more correct.

I feel like most often an absence of competition means there's no market to begin with.

Are people going to no longer releasing stuff on cloud platforms? I have some loyalty to AWS mainly because I've already figured out how to make stuff work nicely on it. However, for whatever I release next I'd certainly consider a competitor. Particularly if they can provide better i/o performance than EBS.

Google and Microsoft have one advantage : they are already successfully selling to the enterprise(Google apps, Windows platform). Amazon is still in the process of figuring that one out. Google and Microsoft are also not afraid to compete in price, combined with the above it makes them the first credible competitors to Amazon dominance. Will be interesting to see how this plays out.

I think that, for a lot of uses, switching away from EC2 would not be terribly difficult if Google could provide superior service or even just a lower price. If you're just using the basic EC2 services, I don't think there is even any lock-in.

New startups will always be in a position to evaluate where to host their products. I think if Google can offer good service at a competitive price it might make sense for new startups to consider them.

It is a huge market, there is plenty of room for even mediocre competition.

I honestly don't understand comments like this (this is hardly the only one). You know absolutely nothing about their service. You know nothing about what they are offering, what their pricing will be, etc.

I have to guess that it's that people are comfortable with EC2 (I am -- great service) and almost want to hope-away anything that degrades the value of the thing that they do know.

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