Amazon has been getting lots of positive press lately on its new storage initiative Simple Storage Service or S3. The service has been a tremendous help to startups as well as established companies as it lowers the cost of scaling a company rapidly and allows a company to focus on its core strengths while relying on Amazon to focus on theirs.
Salesforce.com has similar visions of helping companies by providing cloud based servivces that allow companies to build exciting new products and services without starting from scratch and building huge data centers, etc.
Unfortunately for Amazon, they are in the middle of an outage and not unlike Salesforce.com, they are going to have to reassure the market that this won’t happen again. Then again, Salesforce.com has had a few outages over the years and it hasn’t seemed to slow their growth.