Andrea James’ article and blog (Seattle P-I Seattle Tech Report) highlight how Amazon has had to overcome its public perception as an online bookseller so that developers and researchers would take it seriously as a technology provider.
“Last week, Amazon unveiled a new offering that would make its ‘cloud computing’ service even more appealing to researchers. Amazon will make large data sets available free — some of which are so large they would take hours to download.
“Amazon’s pricing model is attractive enough to make it take off, said Ed Lazowska, the Bill & Melinda Gates Endowed Chair in Computer Science at the University of Washington.
“Making public data available is ‘transformative,’ Lazowska said. ‘If you’re one of the very few companies or scientists who keeps a large cluster of computers going constantly at 95 percent utilization, it’s not for you. But for anyone else, it’s a win.'”