Reuters reporter Alistair Barr has followed up on the contretemps. His piece, which was picked up by the Mercury News, notes the impact of the shock waves the Amazon cloud computing triumph on Old School tech firms, including "Big Blue," as IBM is sometimes known.
The story quoted some investment analysts for attribution. They noted how AWS -- the heart of Amazon's cloud computing initiative -- allegedly strongly shapes Amazon's current stock market valuation. Reuters' Barr grasps the notion that Amazon is really a tech company, an inconvenient fact most journalists ignore. To that end, his article cites AWS' impact on Oracle, cloud computing competitor Rackspace Holding, Microsoft, and other tech heavyweights.
Barr also cites some of AWS' publicly identified clients. One of them is NASA, which, as with the CIA, happens to be involved in highly classified operations. (An ironic aspect of this situation is that Jeff Bezos recently sponsored the retrieval from the Atlantic Ocean of what he claimed were Apollo 11 rockets. A related report and images appear in a gizmodo.com post.)
Another AWS client is PBS. Inquiring minds are wondering why a federally and viewer-subsidized media outlet requires Amazon's cloud computing clout. (In late 2011, PBS and Amazon signed a deal in which PBS would show some of its programming on Amazon Prime.)
What's most interesting in the increased coziness of the Obama Administration's bureaucracy and Amazon is why it's happening at all. Just don't expect that story to appear on the News Hour anytime soon.
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