I'm not familiar enough with all those alternatives you cited to make a feature-by-feature comparison but one key difference is those other tools all use AMI (vm images). The Amazon QuickSight doesn't seem to need a deployment and management of any AMI. The customer just uploads a csv or Excel or points at a data source like Salesforce and instantly starts slicing & dicing the data. QuickSight seems to be positioned similar to Google's Data Studio offering.

>The logic must be: more money in apps than infrastructure.

That seems inevitable. Amazon AWS proved that IaaS being higher up the value chain than bare-metal services was more profitable. Rackspace's decline was proof of that. To continue the climb up the value chain, everybody including Google Cloud and MS Azure is offering higher valued-added services. Even a company like Github couldn't survive purely on on hosted Git disk space. (A "dumb" data pipe and disk space to a shared git repo.) They are moving up the value chain to build out full life-cycle project management to compete with MS Visual Team in the cloud.

PaaS is an important market, and it'd be suicidal for AWS to not leverage its IaaS offerings and build platforms on top. This is kind of what Google does with its apps on Android. They have a replacement for every popular app out there that isn't a game.

In this app economy, something like Google Firebase is going to be a huge player if isn't already and that's the segment you can't compete with if you don't have PaaS offerings.

With Google controlling the entirety of developer ecosystem on Android which is the most dominant phone OS by far via Google Play, it is paramount that AWS doesn't turn a blind eye to it.

In a way, GCP might well be the most widely used Cloud Platform out there by virtue of Google Play integrations in billions of Android Phones, we are choosing to ignore that fact at our own peril.

AWS packages itself as a great enterprise offering. But GCP cloud take over business that are mobile first (Snapchat, for instance), I'd say, if competitors like AWS stop innovating and building.

AWS generally tends to complement its offerings such that they can avoid most of existing users of one or more services from looking at other alternates.

if you want api-level analytics stuff and dashboards, have a look at amazon mobile analytics. it's an interesting alternative to google analytics that lets you control the session key (so it's easy to correlate events from front-end and back-end), and the event data is also yours (so it can easily be exported).