Amazon Web Services: We hate you and We love you.

The 2013 Magic Quadrant for Cloud Infrastructure as a Service from Gartner is out

In my blog entry Part 2. Getting out of the Trough of Disillusion Will cloud computing be adopted massively in 2011? I say:

Ability to Execute and  Completeness of Vision: These are two axes of the Magic Quadrant. This is in a nut shell how the companies are evaluated

•  Market Understanding and Product Strategy are the highest ratings possible in Completeness of Vision
• Product/Service and Customer Experience are the highest ratings for Ability to Execute

To get into the Data Centers, we need to understand this market, the way it is now, setting aside our belief-in-Nirvana that cloud computing will bring. In fact, we need to completely forget any solutions we have in our mind when interviewing for product management purposes a significant customer. We need to be humble   and respect for the all data center classic practitioners

See below the succession of magic quadrants  for 2010, 2012 and 2013

Fig. 1 Gartner Magic Quadrant Cloud December 2010
Note AWS in the middle of the pack, with a below overlarge ability to execute.

Fig. 2 Gartner Magic Quadrant Cloud October 2012
Note AWS takes off. The 2010 judgement that AWS
has no ability to execute probably motivated Jeff Bezos

Fig. 3 Gartner Magic Quadrant Cloud  August 2013.
AWS further distances from the pack who seemingly move backwards.
Perhaps all others were unable to update their visions?

There are a few words we can add. Perhaps a quote from the Steve Jobs movie impersonated by Ashton Kuchner:

I would rather gamble on our vision than make a ‘me, too’ product. 

Jeff Bezos. From New York Times. Things were not always rosy for Mr. Bezos.  

In 1999, Amazon, among the most celebrated of the dot-coms, was burdened with debt and spiraling losses. Jeff Bezos, its founder and chief impresario, had to impress Wall Street that he was serious about cutting costs.

So what Mr. Bezos cut? He eliminated the free aspirin for the employees.

This is what every company on the Magic Quadrant should do. There must be something else in cloud computing than what AWS is doing so well. Corporations are not very good at discovering what it is.

We go back to the Steve Jobs movie. These are the people we need to break through

Here’s to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The trouble-makers. The round pegs in the square holes. The ones who see things differently…they change things. They push the human race forward. And while some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius.

Watch this trailer below from the Jobs movie. Skip the ad and get to the actual scene. Corporate employees are trained to take no risk. Most of the people inside the pack, with a few exceptions, work for these organizations. What we learn from the clip, is we must risk to be somebody, face failure and go over it.  We don't have to catch up with AWS. There are many ways to do cloud differently or add value to existing clouds or simply discover something  new, no one thought before.