I must live in a bubble, protected from the real world, because a lot here surprises me. Is it common for corporations to doubt the reliability of Amazon? This whole paragraph was a surprise to me:<p>"They wondered if Amazon was reliable. This might seem like a strange thing, but in their world, the world of proprietary infrastructure, which is remarkably unreliable, it made sense. Literally, they wanted to know how many nines, how many OC-48s, disaster recovery, etc. They wondered if Amazon scaled. "<p>Is this normal? Do large corporations simply assume that proprietary technologies are better than anything else?<p>Also: This is the first story I know of where a startup committed 100% to Clojure, and then had a reasonably successful end for the story. As such, I think this story is important.<p>This also was a big surprise to me:<p>"I laid some of the skepticism to rest once I was able to explain that Clojure was a JVM-hosted language, which meant that much of the Java ecosystem could be leveraged, including debugging tools, profiling, etc. Although no one said so aloud, I think that they took this to mean that if the acquisition was completed, the system could be migrated to Java. Heh heh."<p>So big corporations are so committed to Java that they won't even consider anything else?