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).
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.