[gerner]

Isn't Amazon S3 $0.085 / GB for the first TB/month (1/10 of what you've said)?

That's still 8.5x Google Drive. Being competitive with glacier jives with what I've heard the underlying cost of storage hardware is (still with room for profit). However, from what I hear running the request serving on top of that is fairly expensive (which is why glacier has big restrictions).

AWS says they're a cost plus org which means they drop prices as their costs drop. But that plus can be quite large.

Being #1, first to market, etc. has a big advantage. Despite knowing (or believing) these things, my org still happily spends plenty at AWS.