Heroku has been able to charge a premium for ease of use. It's hard to imagine, though, that ease of use will be a competitive advantage much longer. Much of their creativity (and it's substantial) has been in showing the way and it's only a matter of time, it seems to me, before that will be imitated (in a flattering way) by open source projects.

Ultimately, it seems, heroku will need to find an additional axis (besides ease of use) to differentiate on. Maybe I'm wrong, though. Apple sure has been able to turn ease of use into a sustainable competitive advantage. In heroku's case, though, there are fewer UI decisions and its audience is super-technical, so I'd be surprised if ease of use alone is sustainable in this domain.

We'll see. I want to see them win, to be honest, because I feel like they've done so much good in a providing such an accessible and (at first at least) cheap way for a developer to get his or her stuff out there.

They give a lot away for free. Too much even. Really it's the addons that get expensive.

I doubt. The prices they command seem attractive to developers with zero infrastructure experience.