Lots of things succeed despite being inelegant, but that does not mean it's not important to be elegant. Amazon can afford to have an inelegant API as they're

Lots of things succeed despite being inelegant, but that does not mean it's not important to be elegant. Amazon can afford to have an inelegant API as they're already dominant (and when they launched, they didn't have many competitors). If someone launching an Amazon EC2 competitor today strapped together a pig-ugly set of RPCs over HTTP, I doubt it would encourage its use. Elegant APIs are a sign that you respect developers.