At best, you can conclude that outdated product design doesn't always ruin a business (clearly). But you can't conclude the inverse (that investing in modern product design doesn't ever help a business).
That's a great point. Further, there are many sizeable businesses built on top of AWS where they deliver the abstractions with compression that earns them their margin.
Case in point: tell me, from the point of view of the user, how many steps it takes to deploy a NextJS/React ecosystem website with Vercel and with AWS, start to finish.
I think they have plenty of competition in the cloud computing space. It seems fair to say that their strategy of de-prioritizing UI/UX in favor of getting features out the door more quickly and cheaply has benefitted them.
However, I don't think it's fair to say that this trade-off always wins out. Rather, they've carved out their own ecological niche and, for now, they're exploiting it well.
Oh I'm sure, the ACM UI was impossible to use for years to find certificates, they improved it, but, it will never have the same level of functionality that the API gives you and that's the bread and butter.
Imagine a native desktop app that let you build a UI with very basic elements, à la Visual Basic, and behind each of those elements is an associated AWS CLI command. Such that "aws s3 ls" attached to a list element would render an account's buckets.
The AWS APIs are so expansive, a product like this could offer a complete replacement for the default web console and maybe even charge for it. Does anyone know if such a solution exists? Perhaps some more generic "shell-to-ui" application? If not, I'm interested in building one if anybody would like to contribute.
It makes more sense to conclude that if you have market dominance, you can get away with a lot, especially since we see this time and again in other matters, not just UI.
At best, you can conclude that outdated product design doesn't always ruin a business (clearly). But you can't conclude the inverse (that investing in modern product design doesn't ever help a business).