One more thing I'd like to mention in this context: ask 100 people why AWS has been so successful.
Think of your answer.
My answer (6 years at AWS; met with ~5,000 AWS customers, so big data set): lowest barrier of entry (swipe credit card, EC2 is up in 2-3 minutes), and lowest barrier of pausing the service (and the billing).
Most people would say any other thing, but not this one. In fact, EC2, S2, EBS were initially quite bad, in terms of performance or price/quality, compared to pretty much anything out there. But you needed 2 minutes to spin up an EC2 instance, vs 2-3 weeks anywhere else.
So you can spin up in a few seconds, scale, stop and even invest in the platform without worrying too much. Also - they don't seem to discontinue services that quickly, again, doesn't feel like you will be screwed.
I just had a call TODAY with a vendor, the price could be as low as $30/unit or $120/unit - that's a near 4x delta from sure to hell no for our use case. Sales guy needs to go talk to their manager to see if they can get us the lower pricing. And who knows if next year (it's annual) we'll again get their "manager" to sign off on the lower pricing.
Something about enterprise sales folks thinking is very short term. No price transparency - maybe we can qualify and squeeze them for more per unit. Or maybe get them in low and squeeze them on renewal once they've invested. The overhead of dealing with them is so high too. Show me actual product screens (not talking heads and bullet points). By the time you get to the demo you have wasted a week of your life.
So big thumbs up to AWS here. You can see baseline pricing up to huge traffic. You can see savings plans discounts up to large amounts etc.
Having to convert between Reserved Instance families to save money, while tricking people into thinking that this is good for them, is a masterstroke of AWS' sales department. Wouldn't you rather be working on the product rather than optimizing RI counts?
If you don't want to do that use savings plans.
If you like talking to sales people and negotiating discounts do that. But they haven't let those sales people shut down / mess up self serve, including options for discounts.
You can get pretty far with amazon's tiered pricing and savings plans / spot etc discounts.
Uploading source code to your provider and letting them figure out how to serve HTTP traffic from it was also a dominant pattern, but was called "shared PHP hosting" instead of "serverless."
I'm not even old. But I guess most people my age probably did not have HostGator accounts when they were 11...
My girlfriend got a traditional CPanel hosting setup a couple of months ago. Being so caught up in my tech bubble, I kind of forgot such quaint things existed.
But the more I think about it, the more I wonder why I’m bothering to write a service with JavaScript, fiddling with webpack, or deploying to Digital Ocean or Heroku or some other overpriced tech-hype VPS service, when I could instead simply drag and drop a .php file into FileZilla and get on with my day?
As you acknowledge, there are few companies that have made the transition from growth to growth+sales in the way AWS has. If Mike can help Stripe chart that course and avoid the shoals along the way, that's hugely positive for customers, employees and owners of Stripe.
I would dare to disagree on, or at least to challenge, the "simultaneously" that you mention, though - in my experience (ex AWS, ex VMware) these two are completely different sales motions, made possible simply by the product itself and how it's discovered and consumed... Despite (yes, despite) what enterprise sales wanted to do. In a way, it's as if AWS self-serve were one entity, and AWS enterprise sales were another one.
In many cases, sales teams were completely not aware of certain things happening, or certain accounts becoming huge overnight, or certain developer behaviors. Some salespeople were handsomely rewarded for having been randomly selected as the sales rep for accounts like, say, Dropbox or AirBnB.
It's hard to describe properly, I know, but it's not as harmonious as one might say at first glance. And I think that the sales team still hasn't a good idea of the other side of the coin.
In a way, AWS' merit is to not have let Enterprise Sales screw up the self-serve part, and I think that's mainly because AWS was, and still is, so much more metric-driven than any other business I'm aware of. Enterprise Sales happened gradually, without interrupting a very addictive self-serve machine.
Anyway, this could be a long conversation with lots of platitudes, so I'll stop here and try to think of better ways to explain what I have in mind.