They were first and from a featureset and reliability perspective, S3 is still unparalleled. That coupled with storage costs that were always very competitive

They were first and from a featureset and reliability perspective, S3 is still unparalleled. That coupled with storage costs that were always very competitive and the fact you had unlimited scale and PAYG pricing got a lot of people hooked. It’s going to take a long time for S3 customers who have experienced pretty amazing uptime and reliability for the entire life of the service to put the same level of trust in something else. CF did a really smart thing by making R2 be able to operate as a transparent caching-replica of S3.