Adding Billing To Web Service Functionalities

We recently covered the various new rollouts of services from Amazon. As expected, this is part of a larger scheme of things. Amazon is now bringing its invisible back-end operations front and center. Amazon has now begun to rent out parts of its IT infrastructure as Web services. Typical customers are like social-networking startups or media-sharing arenas. They can use Amazon's S3 database service to store their users' photos and videos, rather than buying their own servers. In another service, the Elastic Compute Cloud, or EC2, business customers can offload computing-intensive tasks to temporary "virtual servers" at Amazon's data centers. Latest in the list : two additional services, Webstore by Amazon and Amazon Fulfillment, that allow outside companies to build their own commerce sites around Amazon's software, then ship products using Amazon's own warehousing and shipping network. Bezos brings out that at times Amazon was using less than 10 percent of capacity. He highlights that thought more than underutilization, these are actually tools for and more developers to lower the "cost of coordination" as the web-scale applications are hard to run reliably at a small scale, and it doesn't get easier as the scale increases. Read this interesting podcast of Bezos himself.
Is this a game changer?The view is storage and hardware vendors shall fight back and stroke CIO’s to insource more with better deals. With discretionary spending coming down, the propoensity to take risks may also be less for established enterprises, except in the case of startups - they may see some attraction towards these solutions,atleast in the exploratory stage when the scale and financial outgo are minimal. With growth, people may seek more independence and that coule be seen by having more control through insourcing!! For amazon, these are outcomes of adding billing functionalities to existing web services. This is like the scholarly journey - one will find ways and means of using these services and in the process define the market for these.