[zephod]

I believe the author was making the point that the names are overly descriptive ("Elastic Compute Cloud" -- not at all innaccurate, but not easy to grok; the less descriptive "Amazon Virtual Servers" is easier for a newbie to recognise and intuitively understand).

Like most entries on the list, Amazon S3 _is_ a new concept but try explaining it to somebody without mentioning FTP -- you'll see what I mean.

What was that quote about the only hard problems in Computer Science?