I think many would argue that their shipping container full of motherboards style data centers may have hampered them when it came to an IaaS offering. They did

I think many would argue that their shipping container full of motherboards style data centers may have hampered them when it came to an IaaS offering. They didn't leverage VM technology at all did they? That certainly created a bias that led them to GAE. Amazon, Facebook and Microsoft certainly must be operating datacenters on a massive scale and sophistication. They are probably more traditional thus less interesting to tech writers.