[npinguy]

Your comparison is bang on, except that's the point. Amazon isn't trying to be Ikea. It is absolutely trying to provide the building blocks for small companies and large to use their cloud platform in a very foundational manner. Yes, the onboarding cost may be high, but Amazon doesn't mind if customers end up using Heroku or EngineYard instead - they are customers too.

AWS is a lot like Linux that way: Deeply challenging initial learning curve, but the only thing worth considering for serious mission critical architecture. Stability and scalability does come at the cost of user-friendliness.

[cheriot]

Are you saying there's a security and scalability to Amazon over Google Apps? People still make that argument about in house vs hosted, but hosted vs hosted of two major providers is new to me.

[mukundmr]

I don't know about security and scalability, but from what I read, it seems that Amazon gives you fine grain control and AD integration which is nice. Also, customer support is one area where AWS is better than Google in my opinion. YMMV.

[busterarm]

Amazon's customer service basically exists where Google's doesn't.

People often don't realize what a chasm of difference that is.

It doesn't help Google any that Amazon's customer service is _great_.