[ken]

I don't care if AWS is big and bundled as long as they use standard interfaces. Linux is big and it doesn't really matter that there's not much competition. I don't care what system (or even virtual machines or containers) runs my program.

If there were an open standard for "way to upload and store and serve files on the web", and S3 happened to implement that standard, and other companies and open-source projects did as well, then it wouldn't matter to me if AWS was the bundling king or not.

There was nothing magical about the design of Unix, either. It's not the only way to make an operating system, or even the best way. It survived because we got many competing implementations which were basically source-compatible. It really took off when we got free clones that anyone could run on their PC.

[didibus]

At this point, S3 IS the standard for that. And Google's and Microsoft's offering all mimic that API. This could happen for all other of their services.

[apocalyptic0n3]

Not just Google and MS, many smaller services too. Linode and Digital Ocean's object storage both use an S3-compatible API and a number of open source, self-hosted services do as well from what I have seen. The S3 API is the defacto standard at this point.