Amazon did not get lucky with their products. They developed them over a number of years, constantly adapting to customer demands and trying various different types of services. Being able to do this is a luxury that start-ups cannot afford, they need to get lucky with their choices, but Google could have done it.

I wasn't making a GAE vs. AWS comparison though. GAE is not in direct competition with AWS. It's a product with a niche market and I wouldn't see it as a failure. It's just something else entirely than building an AWS competitor.

The argument I was making is that Google wouldn't necessarily have the experience in building a lean, scalable business operation that could successfully compete with Amazon Web Services. As a case in point, Google has been running an exact duplicate of Amazon S3 for a while now, but it has yet to really take off. http://cloud.google.com/products/cloud-storage.html