Why Amazon and Salesforce are pulling away from the cloud pack — Cloud Computing News [GigaOM]

From a timely cloud market reality check

"Yes, I believe Microsoft has some competitive capability, but it is, for now, focused on  features and services it can sell to developers piecemeal. Amazon started this way, but I believe James Hamilton and others helped Amazon determine early on that the real financial market in cloud happens in operations, not development. Amazon’s spot and reserved instance markets are examples. Microsoft doesn’t seem to have grasped it … yet.
Google, too, has the scale to compete with Amazon, but I don’t see it scrambling to address operational needs. Where is the unified console for operating and monitoring all the Google services an IT team is using? How about additional services around application deployment, configuration and monitoring? Google has promise, but it also has a way to go."

Why Amazon and Salesforce are pulling away from the cloud pack — Cloud Computing News