

Amazon's next billion-dollar business eyed - vipivip
http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/07/22/us-amazon-preview-idUSTRE76L39120110722?feedType=RSS&feedName=technologyNews&dlvrit=56505

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jamesbkel
As much as I want to laugh (and maybe even cry) at this, it does bring up a
good point. Not so much in the content, but the fact that it exists in the
first place.

I imagine that for almost everyone on HN the "revelation" of this article is
comically obvious. However, I have had countless clients who were interested
in testing the waters for hosting or HPC work and were committed to sinking a
lot of cash into in-house machines up front. I almost always suggest
experimenting with AWS and then moving on from there. More than 1/2 of the
time I get a bug-eyed look, not because they are skeptical of AWS, they just
have no idea what it is.

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zeit_geist
How I could I miss AWS for so long?! ;p

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nolite
Well, its because it was a "secretive unit"

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diolpah
I literally laughed out loud at this particular example of journalistic
cluelessness. Haven't done that since, well, the Louise Boat.

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fuzzmeister
Perhaps "secretive unit" was in reference to "Amazon doesn't disclose AWS
results"? Still seems rather odd, though.

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rdl
It seems pretty likely that AWS on its own would be worth >$1b right now.
Probably $5-10b in the current market, just based on adoption.

It's pretty weak for enterprise/internal/corp use, vs. web startup, but I
could see them expanding over time.

