Setting up your own servers was absolutely the bottleneck. Providing on demand scalable computing and storage untethered a generation of garage startups from ve

Setting up your own servers was absolutely the bottleneck. Providing on demand scalable computing and storage untethered a generation of garage startups from venture funding. Prior to 2007, if you had a great idea you could build it and then start renting, or building and colocating, servers to run that app for you, at considerable up front expense. Plus, you got to do all of your own system administration, up to and including driving down to the colo when you couldn't adequately diagnose issues remotely. So when you say "what AWS does was previously done by every single IT department at every company across the globe" yes sure but (1) it was done worse in many cases, with data loss or significant downtime, and (2) there were fewer such companies by magnitudes, because of the cost barrier. What AWS did was take a costly process, done inconsistently and to varying degrees of correctness across the business world, and make it available to everyone at a very high quality, with a innovative pricing schedule.