Amazon Web Services and its mammoth-sized inferiority complex

Amazon and other technology vendors are often hyperbolic about their own products. Could this stem from insecurity?

'We're great! Not just great, really really great! Honestly, let me tell you again how truly great we are!'

If, like me, you were at the Amazon Web Services Enterprise Summit recently, these words might clang a horribly dissonent bell for you.

It's inevitable that these sorts of events will feature some back-slapping and self-aggrandisment, but this took the biscuit, cake, and most of the rest of the bakery too.

You expect some shiny toothed VP to stand up and go on at great length about why they feel that their products and services are at the top of the tree, and then exhort everyone present to hand over oodles of cash at the earliest opportunity. You expect it because it's just what tends to happen at these things, but is it at all productive?

I don't believe these keynote speeches are useful for anyone. Why? Because 'company says that its products are great' doesn't make for particularly interesting listening, and it's certainly not something many journalists will want to cover.

There are the slightly more compelling occasions where a company CEO will stir the pot and be critical of a rival, but again, it's just another sales pitch, merely dressed in fancier clothes.

A bit of selling is to be expected, but there are times where it seems technology vendors go overboard, which brings us back to the AWS Enterprise Summit

The opening keynote was presented by Andy Jassy, senior vice president of, Amazon Web Services and Amazon Infrastructure, who was supernaturally keen to tell the audience how brilliant it is that they're "helping companies reinvent IT and use the AWS Cloud as a growth engine".

It took an hour and a half, and for those of us who remained awake, the key takeaways are summarised in my opening paragraph. 'We're great'.

Sure, Jassy was occasionally joined on stage by AWS customers - such as Mark Hall, director of global IT operations at Aviva - but the majority of the 90 minutes was made up of what was an unfettered sales pitch directly from Amazon.

Jassy spent the time going through a list of seven separate reasons why Amazon believes that AWS cloud is good for enterprise; and none of it was brief. What may have started as an update on the latest news from AWS quickly became a drawn out pitch about how amazingly super duper Amazon believes itself to be.

What makes me question the value of all this is that many of those in attendance were already Amazon customers. Essentially, Amazon spent an hour and a half telling people to do what they are already doing. Dull, and a missed opportunity to say something interesting and new.

If you truly believe you're good at something, you let your actions do the talking, you don't spend your time repeatedly telling everyone how good you are. Usain Bolt doesn't wander round telling everyone how fast he is. He doesn't need to, its obvious.

In the same way, its self-evident that Amazon knows its chops when it comes to cloud. They're the biggest player in the cloud-hosting space.

According to Gartner stats from earlier this year, AWS has more than 10 times the computing capacity of the next 14 largest cloud companies combined. You'd think a company in that position of strength could afford to relax a little and tell its customers something more interesting than 'Wow, did we mention how great we are?'

So, AWS, the mammoth of outsourced enterprise-level computing, has a mammoth-sized inferiority complex. But why?

What are the firm's strengths? It basically comes down to scale and price. They have an awful lot of servers, platforms and storage, and they can afford to offer them all at relatively rock bottom rates. And the thing is, that's not actually an incredibly strong position to be in. There's nothing unique about size and price. It doesn't do anything especially innovative, it hasn't invented something wildly original, it just does something simple in a big way, for cheaper than the competition.

On the face of it, not such a terrible position to be in, but when your only differentiators are scale and price, you're always going to be vulnerable to the next big thing - a hungrier, leaner firm, even more keen to buy business with filament-thin margins, and even more adept at avoiding taxes.

That's one reason why the firm feels this need to bray about its own greatness. Another is that it's losing customer loyalty from some quarters.

Retail giant Marks & Spencer, for example, has been vocal about having no regrets about moving away from the Amazon cloud in favour of "insourcing"

"The key thing is we are masters of our own destiny, we own the code. We still have problems but now we can fix them. We always used to have problems but previously we couldn't fix them," lead architect of information management Keith Goldthorpe told Computing at the time.

Of course that isn't the only negative press faced by Amazon; we've already mentioned the tax issue and there are regularly reported concerns about about its treatment of employees.

So that's why Amazon spouts such hyperbole about its own achievements. Once, just once, it'd be great to sit through a keynote at a vendor conference that is more than a three-dimensional press release. I live in hope, if not expectation.