Ben Gilbert: prediction

Transcript context

…All over the place. It was just straight up a business that the incumbents would never have done because it would have cannibalized themselves. Scale economies, this is probably the single greatest scale economies business of all time. I was trying to explore this idea of why now. Why did cloud happen in the late 2000s? One answer is mobile, because as the computing devices get smaller, it acquires more of the computing to be done in the cloud. That's definitely accelerated this trend. The other one is Amazon was the first company to ever try and build data centers at this scale, because they needed them to run the largest web application, amazon.com, and cloud is not profitable unless you run it at absolute massive scale. I think other people may have evaluated this business model in theory, but Amazon was the one that was practically in a position to do it and actually realize the scale economies, or I should say, economies of scale that would lead to the scale economy's power. Yup, and it continues to feed itself now. Because Amazon's the biggest, they have the most surface area over which to spread out their capex and infrastructure costs. Thus, they can charge the lowest prices at similar or higher profit margins than their competitors.…

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