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A comment on Email from Jeff Bezos to employees. Parent comment

Re:Email from Jeff Bezos to employees by rrdharan on Tuesday February 02, 2021 @04:51PM (#26007348)
Cloud Computing is uniquely an Amazon invention the way smartphones are uniquely an Apple invention.

Which is to say there’s a sense in which you’re right and a sense in which this is an absurd statement..

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Re:Email from Jeff Bezos to employees by mr_toad on Tuesday February 02, 2021 @05:20PM (#26007743)
There were data centres before Amazon, but there was nothing like EC2. Infrastructure as code made all the difference.
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Re:Email from Jeff Bezos to employees by progval on Wednesday February 03, 2021 @04:04AM (#26011888)
> but there was nothing like EC2. Infrastructure as code made all the difference.

I believe Grid5000 did it before Amazon [1].

It opened in 2005 and allowed users to automatically book hardware (with OAR [2]) and install their own images (with Kadeploy) on dedicated hardware.

[1]: https://www.grid5000.fr/w/History [2]: https://www.grid5000.fr/w/Getting_Started#Reserving_resource...

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Re:Email from Jeff Bezos to employees by Aperocky on Tuesday February 02, 2021 @07:51PM (#26009257)
This. No one before used RPC calls to provision actual infrastructure as a public business.
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Re:Email from Jeff Bezos to employees by koolba on Tuesday February 02, 2021 @06:53PM (#26008778)
Amazon invented cloud computing the way Ford invented the automobile.
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Re:Email from Jeff Bezos to employees by bernulli on Tuesday February 02, 2021 @08:34PM (#26009567)
I'd argue everyone who has heard of Ford is most likely familiar with Mercedes, whereas the number of people familiar with Amazon will likely be many orders of magnitude larger than the people who know who invented cloud computing. Not quite an apt comparison, imho.
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Re:Email from Jeff Bezos to employees by adventured on Tuesday February 02, 2021 @05:23PM (#26007774)
It's definitely not absurd, even if they only deserve a share of the credit.

There's nothing absurd about the way Amazon and Apple defined cloud computing and smartphones. They deserve as much credit as anyone for the services / products we know today as cloud computing and smartphones. The version of the smartphone that took off in sales, took over the culture and has become a human staple globally, was entirely defined by Apple's iPhone. No other company did that, it was Apple, period. To not recognize them as the prime mover of smartphones would be absurd.

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Re:Email from Jeff Bezos to employees by rrdharan on Wednesday February 03, 2021 @09:45AM (#26013980)
> Amazon and Apple defined cloud computing and smartphones

Absolutely. You’ll note that the OP’s word choice was invented - defined would indeed be appropriate and not at all absurd.

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Re:Email from Jeff Bezos to employees by scottyah on Tuesday February 02, 2021 @06:16PM (#26008410)
I'm certainly no expert on what makes a phone a smartphone, but it seems like Blackberries with their email and small web functionality really kicked off the movement of phones being able to do more than calls and texts.
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Re:Email from Jeff Bezos to employees by xxpor on Tuesday February 02, 2021 @11:13PM (#26010537)
Don't forget windows mobile. And Palm!
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Re:Email from Jeff Bezos to employees by mark-r on Tuesday February 02, 2021 @08:02PM (#26009347)
And Thomas Edison didn't invent the light bulb. History doesn't look on him any less kindly for that.
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