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As such, the company’s value from a technology perspective isn’t software, strictly speaking, but rather outsourced effort. Any business can download and run software like MySQL or PostgreSQL at no cost. But hosting it, keeping it up and running, backing up the databases, and exposing them safely to other applications requires expertise and effort. For many customers, and AWS customers in particular, then, the value isn’t in the software itself — because that is available at no cost — but the saved expertise and effort of consuming the infrastructure software as a service. Amazon, in other words, is making money with software, rather than from software.
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Stephen O’Grady (The Software Paradox: The Rise and Fall of the Commercial Software Market)