>> There's plenty of time for those competitors to catch up to AWS by 2020.

Very true, but this fails to take into account that Amazon will not stay stagnant till 2020 for competitors to catch up.

Because Amazon already have a healthy majority of the users/marketshare, they are perhaps better positioned to understand and innovate upon the future needs of these customers, and keep building their product offerings by anticipating where the "puck is going to be."

With that said, nothing is set in stone, so competitors might as well overtake AWS by 2020, but if I had to bet my money, I'd bet it on Amazon.

Having majority of the marketshare in the marketplace is hardly the best breeding ground for innovation. That is when companies usually stagnate and entrench themselves.

I agree with you assessment, but as long as Jeff Bezos is able and leading the company, I am willing to bet on Amazon's dominance in it's core markets.

Nonsense. Haven't you learned anything from the fact that IBM still dominates computing today??

:)

I think the biggest direct competitors are Rackspace, Windows Azure, Google Cloud, HP, and Dell. Indirectly, VMware and OpenStack are huge competitors too. Lots of companies are trying to decide how their existing infrastructure fits in with cloud computing, and the "private cloud" is one likely choice.

None of these have the wide product functionality that AWS has -- yet. Amazon has a multi-year head start on most of these companies, but as you mention, there's lots of time to make progress before 2020.