[jasode]

>I don't see anything new/different from other analytics apps available on Amazon marketplace [1].

I'm not familiar enough with all those alternatives you cited to make a feature-by-feature comparison but one key difference is those other tools all use AMI (vm images). The Amazon QuickSight doesn't seem to need a deployment and management of any AMI. The customer just uploads a csv or Excel or points at a data source like Salesforce and instantly starts slicing & dicing the data. QuickSight seems to be positioned similar to Google's Data Studio offering.

>The logic must be: more money in apps than infrastructure.

That seems inevitable. Amazon AWS proved that IaaS being higher up the value chain than bare-metal services was more profitable. Rackspace's decline was proof of that. To continue the climb up the value chain, everybody including Google Cloud and MS Azure is offering higher valued-added services. Even a company like Github couldn't survive purely on on hosted Git disk space. (A "dumb" data pipe and disk space to a shared git repo.) They are moving up the value chain to build out full life-cycle project management to compete with MS Visual Team in the cloud.

[candiodari]

There's also that they seriously undercut the marketplace solutions in price. As said before - this is typical for Amazon.