I'm always, <i>always</i>, amazed at how much of Amazon is below the surface of the general public's awareness. They're an iceberg. Sure, the top is huge; Amazon is, I guess, the world's biggest retailer. But, damn, what's under the water that few people see is just incredible. AWS is, by far, the most popular cloud service; it's the default, and hosts several other billion dollar businesses. Bezos has made good on his promise of making computing like the power company: You just plug in your stuff, and pay based on what you use.<p>I don't love any of the AWS APIs, but they got them out the door faster than anyone else (often by several years)...and they <i>work</i>. They can be clunky, but if you make the right incantations, you get the results you need and a limitless pool of resources, if you have the money.<p>But, more importantly, they've led rather than followed...because they knew what a service-based architecture needed to work, because they'd built one of the largest ones in the world before anybody else. So, as companies have grown on AWS, they've always found that Amazon had already thought of the growing pains they were going to run into and had already engineered solutions. So, Amazon is reading your mind, because they've been there and shared that particular pain. So, when you get to that crossroads, there's already an outpost with a note saying, "We went this way, here's a map and some supplies."<p>Yegge's rant on the subject is enlightening, but probably could have mostly been deduced from the outside without prior knowledge. Someone high up had to make the proclamation that Amazon would become SOA, at all costs, and someone had to make the call that it would be built to share, from the beginning. And, it's why so few companies have been able to catch up; only Google and Microsoft have come close, I think, and it's because they have tremendous resources, and some of the same internal forces at work.