The fact that Amazon exists as an online retailer but also offers cloud based hosting services has always interested me. I always wondered if the hosting business was based on technology they had developed in house to support their online retailer business and so decided to set themselves up as a hosting provider based on their own technology, but it appears from some history on wikipedia that they later migrated their online store to the AWS platform, so AWS was developed at a later point.
Kas Thomas has an interesting post about the broad diversification of Amazon’s business.