Amazon's core competency? Pricing.

There is really no additional analysis, explanation, or extrapolation beyond that statement. The key thing that inspired this was that Amazon "introduced spot pricing for servers" which is never actually explained for anyone that might not know what that even means.

I think there was a seed of a good article here, but it should really be more than just stating an idea and leaving everything else up to the reader to determine.

It couldn't possibly be the features, reliability, ease of us, awesome documentation and almost instant availability.

Clearly spoken by someone who has only seen the beast from the outside...