Blackfriars’ Marketings post: Amazon.com’s EC2 hosting service: technology diworsification mentions the following:

Amazon.com has fallen into a strategic trap. Instead of investigating more and better ways to serve its retail customers, it has decided to focus on being a technology company instead, presumably because technology companies often command higher valuations. This EC2 service (even the name is geeky) will distract the company’s energy when it should be gearing up for a tough fourth quarter selling season. Amazon survived the dot com bust because people could understand its business and its competitive advantages in retail. Moves like EC2 will make that understanding much harder now.

I agree that if Amazon starts advertising these services on the amazon.com storefront a lot of people will be confused about it… But I dont see Amazon doing that. If Amazon has gotten their infrastructure refined to the point that offering these services to themselves, internally, has not only become easy but trivial then theres really no reason that they cant make a market out of it. If you do something, and you do it well, theres no reason it shouldnt make you money.

I’d go so far as to argue that this move by amazon is probably one of the most gratifying things that most NetOps guys have seen in a long, long, time. Historically the network operation geeks are the atlases upon whose backs the web 2.0 coders tend to stand. And like mythical Atlas holding the world by himself they tend to go unoticed as more high profile names take credit for the entire job… To me, being an ops person at heart, it’s been immensly gratifying to see a company like amazon look at their Ops guys and say "hey, these guys are valuable… we really need these guys… and they can help our company both directly and indirectly"

If you’ve got it… Sell it 😉