Google = Microsoft and Amazon = IBM

Wow - how did I come up with the equation.

Here goes the story.
Google's strategy is what Microsoft's strategy was in the PC era.
- Start with bottom of the market (Consumers --> Small Business and then Enterprises)
- Create Lock in in some form or fashion. Google creates lock in with non-standard based technologies
a) Google App Engine(a totally google technology that no one else supports or has).
b) Android - intelligent way of creating proprietary technology while also leveraging the user base of Java without using J2ME.
On Android: The key customer for Android IMHO is small business. When all small business's try to sell their stuff via google(adsense , Location based advertising) - that is when google will make money. Android is really a play of getting more and more small business's rely on google for sales.

c) Google Apps - Hosted on the cloud with Google API's - once a small business gets hooked into this - the switching costs to something like office live is not going to make it worthwhile to move.

Google is clearly going after the small business now. Their aim - make it as simple as possible for getting small business onboard and don't bother of open standards , interoperability etc which generally come into an Enterprise Sale discussion.

Amazon IMHO is now really targeting the Enterprise. Although Amazon has also come to the market from bottom up(Startup's were their first customers) but now it is clearly going for the Enterprise

It is not a tightly integrated stack. i.e you can pick an choose EC2 , S3 , SDB or SQS independently and hence no lock in. There are some non-standard technologies like SDB and SQS but they are really at the edges of the offering.

Amazon in reality has an open offering. Use EC2 and if you do not like it you can quite easily switch elsewhere.

The key to Amazon's success is going to be Cost of operations which will be achieved by getting scale and being efficient while key to Google's success is going to be Customer Lock which will be achieved by releasing compelling technology to build a developer ecosystem.

So what happens to the Hp's IBM's and Sun's of the world. Lets See... I dont have an answer yet.