2 Billion per year buys a lot of R&D. So, while Amazon is great for small to mid sized companies, BoA is huge and would need massive discounts to consider using Amazon.
Amazon can invest heavily in new tech because it has millions of customers who get the benefit. BofA can only invest in new tech to the degree that it benefits one (admittedly large) customer. This makes the decision seem more suspect in the long-run.
To the degree that BofA has needs that are unique just to itself, and do not overlap other large business's use cases, this is true. But that seems like an awfully small degree.
A billion dollars sounds like a ton of money on HN, but that's a thousand person tech team for 3 or 4 years. It's enough to do some good tech, but it's very, very easy to spend that much engineering capacity.
This is 2 billion dollars per year. That’s 6-8,000 people working full time indefinitely. Further they don’t need to spend that on staff they can have a large dev team, better hardware, more bandwidth, a 100 person support team 24/7 365, and still save money.
