Michel Feaster: prediction

Transcript context

…Wow. And so Michel, I mean we’ll get into this in tech themes but clearly AWS, a huge successful business right now. Loudcloud, not a huge successful business then. Obviously, timing is the issue but what was it about the timing? Look at the readiness of the internet for enterprise cloud adoption. And the reason, to me, Bezos is so successful today is, one, development is so much more pervasive. So the number of people who could leverage AWS has exploded. Number two, the costs of starting a company has gone to zero, so the number of targets who would be leveraging something like AWS is so much greater now. And three, I think security and privacy have evolved enough that companies are actually willing to bill. So the number of kind of target enterprises, your deal size, all of these elements around kind of go to market have finally matured to where AWS is not an idea, it’s a business. There’s another really big of this which is that the whole concept of server virtualization didn’t really exist yet. Like, it sort of existed. The company VMware which listeners may or may not be familiar with but it’s one of the largest enterprise software and infrastructure companies in the world. It’s majority-owned by EMC these days. What they do, they had created a product that was just starting to take off around this time but wasn’t widely used that essentially let you take physical server machines and slice them up into multiple virtual machines. So one box could serve multiple customers essentially, and that was a big key for making something like AWS work because without that, you needed essentially a separate box for everybody. And that was not yet a paradigm that existed in these days.…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.