Amazon has been public since 1997. There's no Jedi Mind Trick involved with convincing investors to back AWS. The public has had their real financial results av

Amazon has been public since 1997. There's no Jedi Mind Trick involved with convincing investors to back AWS. The public has had their real financial results available to the public for a whole decade before AWS existed. They have been under pressure from shareholders in the same way that VMWare is. You're proposing the idea that VMWare had no idea how to build data centers as a company that builds data center abstraction virtualization software almost exclusively? VMware is a company that partnered with data center hardware companies to make VMWare-branded data center appliances. And they just...don't know how to set up a data center? If Amazon's expertise in e-commerce was a direct line of sight totally obvious foray into cloud computing we'd see Walmart, Target, and eBay operating AWS their own competitors. Amazon leadership saw an opportunity and understood the 20 year vision of how enterprise computing would work in the future. VMWare's managers are solely responsible for not seeing that future and failing to empower their teams to create new products in new categories. That is particularly embarrassing since they are subject matter experts on abstracting away hardware in the data center.