Out of left field

One of my 2006 predictions was:

"An infrastructure vendor - likely Dell or Sun (as it tries to redefine itself) - will introduce infrastructure outsourcing at aggressive, "utility" price points to cover a wide range of network, database, desktop and other services."

I had not counted on amazon to offer compute and storage "in the cloud" - but it is delightful none the less.

• Pay only for what you use.
• $0.10 per instance-hour consumed (or part of an hour consumed).
• $0.20 per GB of data transferred outside of Amazon (i.e., Internet traffic).
• $0.15 per GB-Month of Amazon S3 storage used for your images (charged by Amazon S3).

Not sure I should have been surprised. As I wrote in The Incumbents Dilemma

".. the challengers are not the 6th or 8th market share player in the category but often brand new players out from left field."

While amazon is aiming at more of the free agent developer market (along with its Mechanical Turk for outsourcing tasks), it sets a benchmark for emerging utility computing vendors to aim for.

eBay with Skype in communications, SaaS vendors cannibalizing application hosting and maintenance, Google in everything...left field, indeed.