Think of it like the Amazon marketplace equivalent: watch for products doing well, then get the cheapest possible clone made and sell it as Amazon Basic, while harassing the original vendors of these products and promoting their own brand in search results.
That might follow with recognition that your market might be smaller than what Elastic co has so far projected, and even it might not be enough to sustain $15B market cap, but bursting that bubble should not be all doom and gloom. Being small does not equate not being successful.
Unfortunately for them a lot of users don't need any of that, and are just fine with the formerly-OSS core.
Having used AWS Elasticsearch, it has a lot of deep problems with it in its current state so Elastic can compete on value just fine.
In other news, I think the Elastic licensing change beyond being ethically a dick move (legally it's their right), is just horrible business strategy. I said on this site several days ago that Amazon was just going to make an Apache 2.0 fork and keep chugging along, and that's exactly what we're seeing.
Your margin is my opportunity. (c)
Though AWS still growing too fast atm so they value quantity of services over quality. But once they have capacity they can squeeze out of business almost anyone.