&gt; For reasons that seem baffling in retrospect, Amazon understood this long before any of its major competitors<p>I don&#x27;t think Amazon really &quot;understood&quot;. It&#x27;s more that (according to &quot;The Everything Store&quot;, anyway), accidentally, some emergency servers were reprovisioned as servers on demand for a bunch of frustrated devs who couldn&#x27;t get resources the traditional way. And then demand just exploded and they thought why not sell it and see what happens.<p>It is true that Bezos appears to have a knack for spotting great products that appear accidentally in his org tree, and spinning it out as a separate team (e.g. the A9 team, Kindle...) but it might be that he thinks like a VC and backs everything that looks interesting instead of letting the bureaucracy kill it, and hindsight is 20&#x2F;20...