You still haven't given any indication what those mid sized hosting companies would hope to compete on for the "long tail customers". Even if all the scale adva

You still haven't given any indication what those mid sized hosting companies would hope to compete on for the "long tail customers". Even if all the scale advantages Amazon and Google have currently don't translate into better prices across the board (mostly because they like those margins on e.g. network egress and they have sufficient lock-in for most customers) why, as someone in charge of provisioning cloud facilities for some small or mid-sized company, would I even contemplate going to a competitor? What's gonna be more useful CV and CYA wise? Who's ever been fired for choosing AWS? How is being expert in <obscure hosting provider> going to advance my career? Where do I hire people who know about <obscure hosting provider>? How would I even realistically learn that <obscure hosting provider> might be a good fit for my needs?