[tyingq]

Is Amazon a good comparison? Amazon Web Services is a separate organization from the consumer side (amazon.com, zappos, etc).

As I understand it, the "jewels" (retail/consumer) do depend on AWS...they supposedly are strong on "eating your own dog food". But, they have roughly equal footing and representation. There is the difference that Amazon's services can be sold standalone, rather than just bundled, I suppose.

[rmccue]

Amazon and AWS have different markets (consumers vs business), similar to DuPont's paint and gunpowder (consumers vs military). Generally speaking, the markets don't overlap.

As noted in other comments here, Apple's products and services are both consumer-focussed; ideally, you're trying to sell the consumer both of them, so the outcomes for the two are co-dependent. Amazon doesn't really care about how many instance-hours AWS sells; the iCloud team cares a lot about how many devices Apple sells.