Reuven Cohen makes a more detailed version of this point: "[Amazon] expect a certain level of knowledge of both system administration as well as how AWS itself has been designed to be used. Newbies need not apply or should use at you're own risk. Which isn't all that clear to a new user, who hears that cloud computing is safe and the answer to all your problems. ... You need the late adopters for the real revenue opportunities, but these same late adopters require a different more gentle kind of cloud service... As IaaS matures it is becoming obvious that the "Über Geek" developers who first adopted the service is not where the long tail revenue opportunities are." http://www.elasticvapor.com/2010/05/failure-as-service.html