Amazon is going to do to enterprise cloud companies exactly what it did to book stores

“I find it really hard to believe that we cannot collectively beat a company that sells books,” said Carl Eschenbach, the chief operating officer of VMWare, at the company’s recent annual confab with its partners and resellers. VMWare competes with Amazon to provide businesses with computing and IT services in the cloud and—I’m sorry to say to Eschenbach—he might soon have to suspend his disbelief.

The problem for Amazon’s competitors, as always, is that Amazon is headed by a CEO who is perfectly happy not to make any profit on the goods he sells. The Street loves Amazon anyway because analysts believe in Jeff Bezos’s larger vision, which is that the internet is still (still!) in its nascent stages, and what matters is grabbing as much market share as possible while sucking all the air out of the room so your competitors suffocate and, some day, you are the biggest retail/media/cloud company on the planet.

As evidenced by Eschenbach’s comments, Amazon’s competitors in cloud computing are in denial about how well Amazon’s strategy of being the lowest price provider will work in a space as high tech, and high stakes, as cloud computing. Delivering books is not the same thing as guaranteeing that a Fortune 500 company’s most critical IT systems are always available, they say. Amazon’s cloud is unreliable, they observe.

Disruption: It’s the Amazon way

But this is a fundamental misreading of Amazon’s long-term cloud strategy and the process of disruption itself. Disruption, as seven-year Amazon veteran Eugene Wei (and current head of product at Flipboard) writes in an astute essay on how Amazon works, usually starts with a company occupying the lowest cost, lowest quality part of a market.

That’s precisely what Amazon is doing now: Offering cloud services at rock-bottom prices. Startups love it, and everyone from location-based social network Foursquare to document sharing site Scribd uses Amazon’s web services (AWS). Even pre-web companies are on AWS, like Tickemaster, and established web businesses, like Yelp. Sure, the reliability could use some work. But my own sources indicate that one reason Amazon cloud outages take out the websites of the companies that use them is that those companies have not set up adequate backup and fail-over procedures. In other words, companies use Amazon’s web services knowing they’re taking a risk, because it’s quick and inexpensive and they’re willing to gamble rather than spend more to guarantee their services will never go down.