Are you kidding me? Amazon Web Services is a company that bases their business on others who build their businesses on Amazon’s Infrastructure, yet doesn’t have partner program? AWS appears to have a complete lack of respect for their bread butter eco-system, it is a joke to they give “time to shift”. Shift to what? A business model that doesn’t compete with AWS directly?

It’s time for AWS to get a partner program in place and get a clear product roadmap.

I believe it is a Darwinian style evolution process where entities must continue to evolve and adapt or lose relevance at their peril. Big is not always better perhaps, but growth, adaptability, and evolution in a fast changing marketplace via the integration of desirable functionality that may compete with third party solutions has become a necessary part of doing business in order to remain relevant — and as such competitive irrespective of size (especially given the ability of superior technologies to enjoy swift user adoption rates and hence scale quickly).

Therefore, in an open and dynamic marketplace, all parties should avail themselves of the best possible solutions to be as seamlessly integrated as possible into their product / platform offerings as in the end this is what users are seeking — and this is what therefore drives success via ability to compete whether with corporate giants or small start-ups (which won’t remain small for long if allowed to operate without competition).

In the end I agree with the comments re: commoditization of technology services. Ultimately competition (again irrespective of “size”) itself “competes away” monopolistic advantages which can charge excessive prices (“rents”) for their products & services whereas commoditization via open market competition is good for all consumers while also ensuring that they receive superior products and services from multiple sources and vendors.

http://sharevm.wordpress.com/2009/01/09/web-based-ec2-console-alternative-to-elasticfox/