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