> Do you think the people behind AWS didn't model the potential cloud services market, and were taken by surprise by the success? Yes. The project was born ou

> Do you think the people behind AWS didn't model the potential cloud services market, and were taken by surprise by the success? Yes. The project was born out of Bezo's edict early on in the creation of Amazon that everything the company does internally must be able to be turned into a service. Almost every analyst in 2006 was against the idea and Bezos admitted it would not be a forseeable revenue stream: > Stifel Nicolaus & Co. (SF ) analyst Scott W. Devitt notes: "There's not going to be any economic return from any of these projects for the foreseeable future." Bezos himself admits as much. ... "We think it's going to be a very meaningful business for us one day," he says. "What we've historically seen is that the seeds we plant can take anywhere from three, five, seven years." From this 2006 story: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2006-11-12/jeff-bezos-risky-bet https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2006-11-12/jeff-bezo... In 2011(or 2010?) AWS revenue was still listed in the "Other" column on their 10K, even though it was by then their #1 area of growth. So yes, I think the scale of the success surprised them. It certainly surprised analysts who think like you do, nearly all of which expected AWS to be something between a hobby and a folly (read the Bloomberg article).