The years from 2006 to 2010 gave rise to today's BigTech. Microsoft, Yahoo!, and Google were pioneers in the data-centers space. Amazon was only beginning to t

The years from 2006 to 2010 gave rise to today's BigTech. Microsoft, Yahoo!, and Google were pioneers in the data-centers space. Amazon was only beginning to turn-up the heat. In retrospect, given the engineering talent and expertise at Y! at the time, it is a shame that in light of AWS' success they did not invest in Infrastructure-as-a-Service when their "web services" org was already churning out a range of tools and services on top of SOAP / REST. I mean, the Apache Hadoop ecosystem was mostly Yahoo! As an outside observer, I think, with any luck, cloud computing could have saved Y!'s bacon, even as a late entrant (MSFT re-launched Azure in 2010). Y!'s focus on being a Media house now seems like a bad bet, which could have worked had they snapped Facebook for $1B. Microsoft struggled with its initial "Red Dog" / "Windows Azure" release in 2008, too; so much so that parts of the company were EC2 customers back in the day. I think this goes to show how stars had to align for AWS to stay a market leader as they started from a position of disadvantage (and needed a decade of exponential growth to consolidate only to contend with unrelenting competition from Azure), in face of companies that were are no slouches in terms of ability and product innovation, either. For Google though, around the same time Y! was floundering, their acquisitions and execution with Android, YouTube, and Chrome (I like to say Chrome was acquired because Google literally hired lead Firefox engineers to build it) ensured their relevance in the decade to come. No wonder the folks who ran AWS, Azure, and Android/Chrome ended up as the eventual CEOs of their respective trillion-dollar mother-ships; whilst Y! has bitten the dust.