I agree with you about reverse engineering the giants, it is one way of acquiring knowledge.
However I disagree on :
> If AWS/GCE/Azure (or any other major software vendor) is offering a service or a feature, then it is almost certainly solving a problem somebody has.
AWS/GCE/Azure have industrialized the process of proposing new building blocks. The cost for them to propose and maintain a new service is lower than a few years ago. They are logically able to experiment more with users, and eventually shut down services with no actual needs (or overlapping with another service they propose). Especially true for Google.
I have the intuition it also works as a marketing process : more you spend your time reading their documentation, more you accept their brand, more you are statistically going to buy something from them.
I agree with you about reverse engineering the giants, it is one way of acquiring knowledge.
However I disagree on :
> If AWS/GCE/Azure (or any other major software vendor) is offering a service or a feature, then it is almost certainly solving a problem somebody has.
AWS/GCE/Azure have industrialized the process of proposing new building blocks. The cost for them to propose and maintain a new service is lower than a few years ago. They are logically able to experiment more with users, and eventually shut down services with no actual needs (or overlapping with another service they propose). Especially true for Google.
I have the intuition it also works as a marketing process : more you spend your time reading their documentation, more you accept their brand, more you are statistically going to buy something from them.