Like, the premise of these offerings has absolutely no need to try to compete with stuff running on AWS as they are clearly barely taking any excess margin over running it yourself. I would always have said the goal of these offerings was to make it easier to use AWS so you didn't have to build it yourself (and some of this stuff is complex to get right).

It matters when they see a profitable business opportunity in optimizing the bundled costs of the service offerings. And who can say "clearly" what the real margins are, especially at scale? All we know for sure is whatever those are, they are good enough for them to continue to offer these managed services.

I dunno--AWS's could be better without spending effort on it? The same way every other cloud provider incentivizes using their managed services?

Don't get me wrong--a number of managed AWS services are very good. RDS is, even, for a lot of use cases. But AWS forces you to consider cost versus quality when you fall in the RDS gaps, and that's a shitty way to do business. AWS relies on being the only network transit provider in town to incentivize continued use of horizontally related offerings.

This is literal anti-competitive behavior, just as browser bundling was for Microsoft. Like that's the definition of it.