Right, just a trivial matter of engineering right? ;)
Amazon has a unique advantage here because the systems and technologies needed to run the retail website are very much identical to what's needed to serve up a commercially viable PaaS offering to the public. So much so that amazon is moving rapidly toward self-hosting the web store on aws (a lot of it is already on aws today).
In contrast the way google runs their own services is very different (though in some ways more advanced) and not generally suitable to morphing into commercial cloud services, so they don't have that self-hosting advantage. They certainly have the know how to put out a decent offering though, especially now that the market has spoken so clearly on exactly what it wants.
It goes deeper than that. They've been working on Service-Oriented Architecture for over a decade. I think I heard that Monkeybagel was a satire of Amazon's SOA push.
Nah--I wrote that about Amazon's initial design for an internal-only enterprise backup system, which was created by an MBA and given to me to make happen. (I scrapped it in favor of hiring someone who knew how to do it).
I would love to have someone talk my ear off about the technology behind google's SOA. I have a little bit of experience in the area and the different solutions people come up with for the problems are fascinating.
Amazon has a unique advantage here because the systems and technologies needed to run the retail website are very much identical to what's needed to serve up a commercially viable PaaS offering to the public. So much so that amazon is moving rapidly toward self-hosting the web store on aws (a lot of it is already on aws today).
In contrast the way google runs their own services is very different (though in some ways more advanced) and not generally suitable to morphing into commercial cloud services, so they don't have that self-hosting advantage. They certainly have the know how to put out a decent offering though, especially now that the market has spoken so clearly on exactly what it wants.