There's an interesting note about amazon in there: "if Amazon intends to gain lock-in and true competitive advantage. . .".
The thing that's missing is any history of Amazon going for lock-in. In fact, Amazon looks like the anti-lock-in company. They allow their competitors to sell in their site, used products to be sold alongside their new products, etc. The closest thing to lock-in that Amazon has tried is Amazon Prime in which you pay for 2-day shipping in a lump sum rather than as you go.
Amazon's business has always been about efficiency and high-volume, low-margin. I don't see why their hosting business would end up different. In fact, Amazon seems perfectly comfortable with companies like RightScale selling on top of them.
In fact, Amazon seems perfectly comfortable with companies like RightScale selling on top of them.
Just because Amazon has nothing to fear from their customers doesn't mean the reverse is true - Amazon just announced they are starting to add the kind of monitoring and management features to EC2 which RightScale provides, making EC2 more attractive and forcing RightScale to do more to differentiate themselves.
Amazon may not intend it, but their cloud does have some lock-in.
There's data locality lock-in: If your data is at Amazon, it's cheaper to operate on it there. (Likewise if you want to operate on someone else's data, but I haven't seen this case.) This is pretty fundamental to data centers, so I wouldn't blame Amazon for it. OTOH, they're not taking steps to fix it, either.
There's also a type of "accidental" lock-in because Amazon doesn't use standards like OVF. They don't seem to be in any rush to fix this.
The thing that's missing is any history of Amazon going for lock-in. In fact, Amazon looks like the anti-lock-in company. They allow their competitors to sell in their site, used products to be sold alongside their new products, etc. The closest thing to lock-in that Amazon has tried is Amazon Prime in which you pay for 2-day shipping in a lump sum rather than as you go.
Amazon's business has always been about efficiency and high-volume, low-margin. I don't see why their hosting business would end up different. In fact, Amazon seems perfectly comfortable with companies like RightScale selling on top of them.