Dave Winer breaks it down on why AWS matters, asking why Google and Microsoft seem to be missing the boat.

Of course, insiders are aware that Google is almost certainly going to launch MapReduce as a service, or similar, inside the next year. Still, the real news here, to me, is that Amazon is moving forward incredibly fast. In terms of playing to strengths, they seem to be in a tremendously powerful position, already offering:

  • Flexible Payment Service (FPS)

  • Simple Storage Service (S3)

  • Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2)

  • Simple Queuing Service (SQS)

  • Mechanical Turk

  • Alex Web Services

  • Simple DB (SDB)

That’s a tremendous amount of catching up to do even if Google wanted to or was geared internally to produce a service beyond MapReduce.

The train has left the station . . .