5 years, 1 month and 28 days after S3 is publicly launched. It is just a reminder that the threat by incumbents to startups is hardly worth worrying about.
I didn't mean it as an analogy, but there are plenty of examples if you are looking for Google vs startup. Twitter/Buzz, Groupon/Google Offers, Facebook/(Whatever Google's Social Strategy is).
5 years to clone a product that Google already has the infrastructure for and is within Google's core mission seems excessively long.
Gmail is a product, S3 is a piece of infrastructure used by other products.
Google's mission is also to make money, companies make money by focusing on their core strengths. I would rather have Google not clone other people's products, Microsoft did that and they failed over and over again.
S3 may help you organize your information, but that information is probably not public, and if it is then Google's services can access it anyway - they also aren't a charity - if you're looking for charity (i.e. products released for the betterment of the world only) then you need to search for non-profits.
Amazon was hardly a startup 5 years ago. And we're talking about a service and a space that's difficult to replicate and get into. S3 had resources most startups won't have to get that 5-year lead.
The point still stands; this isn't an example of why startups shouldn't fear giants/incumbents. Just because Google couldn't/chose not to get a product like Amazon S3 out the door to compete with Amazon, doesn't mean incumbents can't replicate and dominate a bootstrapped start-up's low-cost, innovative web app or mobile app.
The statement should say that startups with innovative, hard-to-reproduce products have nothing to fear; you'll either produce a product that they'll choose not to compete with/can't compete with (Twitter, Facebook) or get bought by them.
I'm trying to innovate in the same field that Bubbleshare was in. I only learned about them recently via reading old techcrunch posts. What killed them? Did they go through a prolonged period of difficulty?
The push by Amazon into cloud services was very different from the business they were pursuing up to then. OK, so they were essentially just wringing some money out of all the infrastructure they already had in place but it was quite a radical change for an incumbent.