An old saw comes to mind: "If you can't baffle them with brilliance, befuddle them with bullshit".
That said, I'm not sure what this guy is trying to say either -- sure sounds impressive, though! Basically, it appears that amazon has more capital investment in 'cloud' services than many companies that are dedicated cloud infrastructure providers. Given their head-start and continuing lead in the field, that's not that surprising.
Here’s a little excerpt toward the end of “Alas, Brave New Babylon.”
The man-machine social engine believed that it had become God, but all man-made constructions are imperfect. The bridge to the future supporting humanity’s billions of lives was built of pixie dust suspended in the ether by magnetism. It all shattered to atoms when the props were kicked out from under the whirling techno-machine, and we all had to live on what we could grow or raise within our eyesight without murdering each other.
It had to happen sooner or later, and sooner, it happened. We couldn’t even pump clean drinking water without electricity. We were like a happy moon base that sprang a fatal leak to the vacuum of space. Electricity was the oxygen we breathed, and without our technology, we died in our spacesuits like stranded cosmonauts on abandoned space stations.
The primary lesson that I have learned over the past three years is that it is much harder to build and to sustain a stable and functioning civilization (even an admittedly imperfect one) than it is to destroy a pretty damn good civilization in the name of establishing utopian perfection by government decree.
Modern mankind’s quest for utopian perfection was a form of mass delusion. Computers lent a veneer of artificial wisdom, but they were simply powerful yet fragile tools, tools which extended our society far out over a worst-case precipice. In the end the price of computerized perfection was all or nothing, and in the pursuit of all, we wound up with nothing. The glittering screens were pretty while they lasted, but they turned into broken glass in our bitter hands.