When Amazon began reselling their backbone as web services, another barrier to the internet collapsed. Much like the introduction of the LAMP stack heralded the arrival of commoditized web applications, Amazon's service heralded the commoditization of large-scale application deployment. A budding web company no longer needs to choose between initial infrastructure investments (in the form of large-iron servers) or robust prayer (that their nascent website can survive a digg, crunch, or slashdotting).
The problem...or at least my problem...with Amazon's services was trust. As the first large-scale cloud computing service, Amazon was destined to experience growing pains of some sort. Companies that bought into their technologies had to trust that these pains would not prove deliberating, and had little choice but to sit back and hope during recent outages.
Today, Google has launched their own version of Amazon's cloud computing technologies. While currently more limited in scope, Google's histoy suggests that they will eventually be brought up to speed with Amazons offerings, though likely in a slightly different form. Once some form of parity in these services is achieved, purveyers of cloud computing techology will finally have the one missing peice of the web services puzzle.
Redundant services.
Once platform developers are comfortable in the niceties of both environments, I anticipate that most smart startups will begin to hedge their infrastructure bets and learn ways to load-balance their offerings across both of these platforms. As each service is pay-as-you-go, the ongoing costs will not be drastically different than the consumption of either service separately, and the ability to leverage the infrastructure of two web giants should outweigh any additional development overhead.
This can only be a good thing for everone involved. Google has found yet another revenue stream that leverages its massive hardware backbone, developers gain the power of choice, and even Amazon should benefit from the growth caused by the expanding market. All in all, it is a good day for the internet.