Specifically, Amazon was early to the party on cloud computing because Amazons usage trends vary so widely, their off-peak hours would leave them with thousands

Specifically, Amazon was early to the party on cloud computing because Amazons usage trends vary so widely, their off-peak hours would leave them with thousands of idle servers. Google has plenty of horsepower to spare, sure, but their usage pattern is much more planned for and expected, so launching a cloud required carving out resources for it, while Amazon just had to make use of excess resources it couldn't find a better use for.