Well this is what set me thinking:

> "... if Amazonians sat down and asked themselves "what do customers need in order to design their applications well" they could probably come up with several services which Amazon already has internally. AWS should return to its roots and release important building blocks - the things customers will need, not necessarily what they're asking for."

I'm guessing shareholders would rather cut services and costs to increase profits on the short term, rather than listening to engineers inside the company who are saying, "look, if we let customers use these great internal tools we've built for our own needs, everyone will be happier and this will improve our services and bring in more customers."

Again - labor is more important than capital for long-term survivability.