I respect Brad and usually enjoy his posts, but this one is full of s... He doesn't give a single example of why "AWS is not the best product at anything". Thi

I respect Brad and usually enjoy his posts, but this one is full of s... He doesn't give a single example of why "AWS is not the best product at anything". This is obviously true, but the same could be said about Google, Microsoft, or Rackspace. So what's the point? Who has a better offering? The discussion of AWS being more expensive than bare metal is valid, but that's an obvious statement. Amazon uses bare metal (albeit at scale), and adds their application stack + support. You're paying for the convenience of purchasing all services integrated from a single vendor. If your business is simple enough and you can just throw hardware and bandwidth to solve your needs, then bare metal will always be cheaper. But for more complex environments (e.g., multi-regions, global distribution, auto-scaling), or when you need to quickly scale up and down (to accomodate surge in demand, for example) bare metal is not an option. Net net, this sounded like a rant against Amazon's world domination plans, and the threat to the very existence of some of the companies on his fund. He said it best: "We used to think of Amazon as a potential acquirer for these companies, or at least a powerful strategic partner. Now we know they are just using the bait of “we want to work more closely with you” as market and product intelligence." If your business model depends on a strategic partnerships with or being acquired by Amazon, you're doing it wrong.