I know that’s what the interwebs say today, but having lived through it at the time and looked at the SLAs the initial service provided, it is what indeed happened. The SLA (Service Level Agreement) promised different levels of service from Thanksgiving on than for other times of the year. Unfortunately, I don’t have a copy of that SLA today.
Business-wise, it was a very big pivot, and it was very controversial on Wall Street, especially with the continued investment required that made it appear Amazon wasn’t actually making money. We even had discussions about it here in 2016.
The Innovator’s Dilemma book discusses how companies struggle to pivot their main business, including examples from the disk drive industry where even pivoting to a new size drive was problematic, as well as pivoting in adopting new technologies (like excavators from steam to hydraulic).
IBM has pivoted twice - once from mainframes to PCs, and then again to consulting services. The latter hasn’t gone as well as they hoped.
Tesla is in the middle of a couple pivots right now - from selling cars to robotaxi services. And a whole new business with Optimus robots. Their prior pivot to add solar and battery power solutions hasn’t been a failure, but hasn’t had the success some of us investors had hoped.
For Nvidia to pivot from mainly hardware design (GPUs, CPUs, boards, networking, boards, servers) to software will be a big deal, and there’s no guarantee they will be able to pull it off successfully. Sure, Nvidia already has a bunch of software talent on board, but they haven’t made a splash with any applications. They’ve been working on self-driving for years, but their efforts seem more about getting the actual autonomy players to choose Nvidia hardware than to actually use Nvidia software in products.
Jensen Huang is super-smart and I’m sure understands all this. However, his company is an aircraft carrier in a sea of F50 foiling catamarans.