IBM's purchase of Softlayer has to be one of the biggest contributors to AWS's success. Softlayer clearly needed a change of direction / leadership, and I gues

IBM's purchase of Softlayer has to be one of the biggest contributors to AWS's success. Softlayer clearly needed a change of direction / leadership, and I guess we'll never know, but i feel they (via IBM) took a left turn when they should have gone right. Instead of trying to become cloud, they should have doubled-down on baremetal. What they _really_ needed was a pricing page that didn't force you to go through sales and reflected the price that you'd eventually get (50% less than what they advertised).