To be fair to the skeptics, for every Amazon or Google, there were 10 other companies that were actually bad ideas or didn't survive the dot com crash. It's also hard to say how much of the take here is apocryphal in terms of AWS being a plucky demo. It seems inevitable that someone would realize that with good enough bandwidth infrastructure, concentrating utility computing in data centers and increasing utilization of those resources through multi-tenency is just a good idea that is beneficial for the capital owners and the renters. Research into distributed and shared computing was around since the 80's, Amazon was just the first to realize the business potential at a time when hardware virtualization actually supported what they were trying to do.