Amazon wants to win–have you heard? The company will sacrifice anything for ultimate victory. (You can ask impatient investors who want to see big profits. Amazon screams back: growth!) Cloud computing is the most ferocious of all the tech company battlefields–and pricing is a key factor in victory as vendors struggle to distinguish their cloud offerings. All the big companies–Google, Microsoft, IBM, Dropbox, etc.–keep lowering their prices for cloud services. They have to.
Business Insider has an article about the so-called “race to zero“–a never-ending cutting of prices that undercuts the cloud as a profit-maker. It’s a potentially vicious cycle for some competing businesses. Amazon leads the race to zero. As of July Amazon had cut its AWS (Amazon Web Services) cloud prices 44 times in six years. It’ll probably cut them again this month. That’s what customers want. And wherever possible, Amazon appears determined to give customers what they want–unless the want a book from Hachette, delivered fast!
