Despite all that and whatever you say, the fact is you do compete. It doesn't have to be a race to the bottom.
So Cloudfront free tier and the latest discount bundles etc aren't to compete? People have also negotiated private pricing way below list price and a lot cheaper than competitors.
Similarly was the Dynamodb price cuts not due to competition?
I can give way more examples...
All technology gets cheaper over time. There is a difference between lowering price in response to competitors and finding the profit maximizing price based on supply and demand.
AWS was lowering prices to increase demand before GCP and Azure were a thing.
Jassy said right before he became CEO of Amazon and he was still over AWS that only 5% of IT spend was on any cloud provider. They are capturing non consumption and marketing value of AWS vs that.
While I don’t have any insider experience about Azure, looking on the outside, I would think that Azure’s go to market is also not competing against AWS on price, but trying to get on prem customers on Azure.
Microsoft doesn’t compete on price. Their major competitive advantage is Big Enterprise is already big into Microsoft and it’s much easier to get them to come onto Azure. They compete on price only when it comes to making Windows workloads Bd SQL Server cheaper than running on other providers.
AWS is the default choice for legacy reasons and it definitely has services an offerings that Google doesn’t have. I have never once been on a sales call where the sales person emphasizes that AWS is cheaper.
As far as GCP, they are so bad at evterprise sales, we never really looked at them as serious competition.
Sure AWS will throw credits in for migrations and professional services both internally and for third party partners. But no CFO is going to look at just the short term credits.