What Will Stop The Amazon Cloud Juggernaut?

A lethal combination of market forces positions AWS to grow ever larger as they squash competitors like bugs under their sandals

Love ‘em or hate ‘em, you’ve got to give Amazon.com credit. Not only is Amazon Web Services (AWS) the undisputed leader in the Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) market, they are moving faster than their competition. Try as their competitors might, they all appear to be losing ground to this Cloud juggernaut. Amazon’s low-cost Wal-Mart strategy of continually lowering prices as they achieve ever-greater economies of scale is squeezing the profitability of direct competitors, forcing most of them to look for niches Amazon hasn’t targeted…yet.

In fact, Amazon has built a classic virtuous cycle. They got IaaS to work, disrupting the pre-existing data center outsourcing market. They achieved market dominance, enabling them to be the low-cost leader. And they figured out how to scale, facilitating unlimited growth. This lethal combination of market forces positions them to grow ever larger as they squash competitors like bugs under their sandals. But such growth and market dominance cannot go on forever, can it? What—if anything—has any hope of stopping, or even slowing down, the Amazon Cloud juggernaut?