Steve Yegge's classic platforms rant gives some insight into why Amazon was ready for the cloud: https://gist.github.com/chitchcock/1281611

I find that impressive too - completely different to its core business. Totally flies in the face of any advice to stick with the business you know.

Amazon getting into on demand hosting early is in it's DNA. If you look at them as a business that grew up on earning profits on very small margins. And that early on demand hosting was pretty low margin, that in their case also let them offset some risk of building data centers earlier than they would have otherwise.

Interesting viewpoint - also achieving profit through massive scale is their DNA as well I would say.

Still though, enterprise is a tough domain in my experience, AWS did a great job

Bezos graduated summa cum laude electrical engineering and computer science and then had a fair part in building out Amazon's own infrastructure. He probably knew that stuff quite well even if it was only a support to the core business.

The difference between AWS and Gcloud is the ability to have a human conversation 1 click away. Shouldn't be that hard to replicate for Google.