Is there anything I can show you to convince you otherwise? You make a lot of gut claims that I'm worried we're straying away from what can be conveniently falsifiable.
In terms of your counterexample, perhaps a look at the historical growth of each: http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=amazon+dell+stock+price.... But I'd like to move away from Dell, because what I'm addressing is the notion that Amazon is not a "player" comparable to Facebook, Apple, or Microsoft. Dell is a hardware company. Similar, but not enough in my opinion to make such a comparison.
I think we can agree that Amazon is apparently not as recognizable to an end-user as those other companies. I don't think that diminishes their role in the landscape, and I don't totally trust your opinion that they are so conveniently replaceable.
We probably just have different ideas of what it takes to "define the future of the internet".
Pretty much nothing that amazon does will ever affect me personally, nothing wrong with that - amazon aren't even trying to define future of the internet in my eyes.
If amazon as a hosting company tries to interfere with their customers you bet they will be abandoned ASAP, doesn't matter if amazon has the best web hosting service it's still the sites they host that matter for the future of the internet and amazon has no control what so ever over that - so how can that possibly matter in this context?
The first post talked about Silk as an example of Amazons influence, really? Opera alone really feels like a small player yet Opera has way more than ten times more active users than amazon has even sold Silk-capable devices. Opera are also active in the development of future web standards, which I doubt amazon are. Again, nothing wrong with that - it's just that amazon have an entirely different focus and thus I get quite confused when you talk about stock prices - what on earth is the relevance? Seems to me that even Opera work way more towards defining the future of the internet than amazon does (or want to do).
Well to be honest, I never tried to assert that Amazon was "defining the future of the internet." I was disagreeing with your point that Amazon shouldn't even be compared to Facebook, Apple, Google, or Microsoft. And to be fair, instead of noting Amazon's horizontal stretch, I pigeonholed myself talking about AWS (which by the way, is more than web hosting: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazon_Web_Services#List_of_AWS...)
Maybe it's just that we work in different contexts. For example, at least in my field, EC2 is the de facto scalable distributed computing provider. For most intents and purposes, Amazon is the cloud computing service. Web hosting is not unique, sure, but many of the other AWS products are. If Amazon disappeared tomorrow, there would be no equivalent for many of them.
I think my point boils down to this: just because you might not frequently see Amazon on your end does not mean they should be dismissed. They are an important part of the industry right now and are absolutely worth considering in the same breath as the others.
Well, in hindsight I might have been a bit unclear but it was in that context that I made my comment(s). I sure recognize Amazon as a company (and eagerly await the day I have a project that is suited for EC2).
In terms of your counterexample, perhaps a look at the historical growth of each: http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=amazon+dell+stock+price.... But I'd like to move away from Dell, because what I'm addressing is the notion that Amazon is not a "player" comparable to Facebook, Apple, or Microsoft. Dell is a hardware company. Similar, but not enough in my opinion to make such a comparison.
I think we can agree that Amazon is apparently not as recognizable to an end-user as those other companies. I don't think that diminishes their role in the landscape, and I don't totally trust your opinion that they are so conveniently replaceable.