I find the idea that AWS will just eat the competition always a little silly as well. I've used AWS managed offerings that were far inferior to the alternatives.

So why were you using the AWS managed offering then instead of the alternative?

Usually because the company already pays an AWS bill. No one will care if you add another Lambda function, but to use an alternative you’ll have to get past some gatekeepers.

So there you go. Lots of friction for competitors.

And yet we've never seen anyone beat Amazon yet. Look at how much the PaaS area has churned over the last 10 years. Giants that stuck around like Docker are completely deflated and near worthless compared to their initial values and expectations. The smart ones like Heroku got out when the getting was good.

> And yet we've never seen anyone beat Amazon yet.

That largely depends on your definitions of "beat" and "win". There are plenty of software infrastructure firms out there that Amazon has yet to smash into the ground.

Nature seems to think (and I agree) simply existing is winning.

Please give examples. I would like to learn more about it (even if subjective)

DigitalOcean is a competitor of comparable size (even if its like a pebble to a boulder): https://finance.yahoo.com/news/blavatnik-backed-digitalocean...

I use Digital Ocean and definitely vouch for them. They are way cheaper compared to AWS too. Nice, slick UI too.