Re: amazon the bookstore?
It's baffling why you would be reading the reg and not understand.
I have never seen an outage in the Amazon "bookstore" which suggests to me their infrastructure is pretty reliable. And tell me you don't really think Amazon is just about books now?
With so much flexible compute power available, you can scale your app up or down according to demand. Sure you can do that with Rackspace and others. But how many other providers offer 3 tiers of storage, databases (as a service), DNS, load balancers (as a service), firewalls (as a service), etc. etc.
I like Rackspace, but they aren't set up for an environment with hundreds of instances, that for example, you want to be sure have the same firewall rules applied. (That means an off box firewall, sure I could do it with iptables on the box, but then what stops a deranged developer flushing the rules so he can make something work)
Amazon is the one stop shop for this stuff.
Why should buying compute time be any different from buying a book or any other commodity? If they can sell books, they can sell compute.
I just had a look at the CSC website trying to find their cloud services. Eventually did. Couldn't find a "buy now" button, so followed the "getting started in the cloud" link and got a pile of whitepapers to read. I was hoping for a "click here to create an account" button. Eventually gave up. They clearly don't want customers. Their lack of experience selling books has spilled over into their inability to sell compute.