I think you're totally right. There's a product manager somewhere in AWS whose using the comparison "total cost and productivity of managing own infrastructure"

I think you're totally right. There's a product manager somewhere in AWS whose using the comparison "total cost and productivity of managing own infrastructure" vs AWS. That means cost of people building/managing servers, but also goes much higher up the stack into the other services they provide from backup, content distribution, etc. In fact, Amazon is commoditising simple IaaS because that comparison would be AWS vs "Buying my own server and plugging it at the datacentre" which would be a lot less compelling. They want to drive the first comparison, while stopping others getting started in the second one.