Andy Jassy, the head of Amazon's cloud business and the Harvard MBA who wrote its business plan, told the Sunday Telegraph in London over the weekend that AWS could some day displace Apple as the world's most valuable tech company.

"We don't say to ourselves, ‘What we're really doing is trying to build the largest technology company in the world,'" he told the paper. "We just happen to think, with how much computing is going to move to the cloud, and with the breadth and global footprint that we have, and our continuing [commitment] to iterate at a very fast pace, it just has the chance to be the largest technology company."

Amazon doesn't break out Amazon Web Services' results, but watchers reckon it could currently be at $1 billion-$1.5 billion in revenues, supposedly profitable despite very thin margins.

"At the highest levels of this company," Jassy said, "we believe that it's quite possible that AWS ends up being the largest business in Amazon. We believe [that] passionately. Now that is saying a lot because our retail business, which is a $40 billion business, is still growing 25% to 30% year-on-year. We're not there yet and I don't know how long that will take but we see that as a real possibility."

Quoting analysts, the Telegraph suggests that Amazon is out to "own the Internet" by leveraging a "different backdoor" than Google, which is effectively supposed to own it now.

That backdoor is what Jassy touts as the "Internet operating system" as manifest in AWS.

He's convinced that cloud computing is going to predominate. "People should make no mistake about it the model that we're pursuing is going to be the dominant way that computing exists in the next 10 years. You can jump up and down all you want. You can raise all the objections that you want. You can take any bump along the way and say, ‘Look, look, look!' and try to scare people. But the reality is that if the value proposition is that compelling it is going to happen. You can't stop gravity."

And he figures Amazon's first mover advantage is going to win out over the so-called old-guard cloudwashers passing off legacy technology as the cloud. "There isn't a compression algorithm for experience. You can't learn a lot of the lessons without having [our] scale and diversity," he says.

See www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/newsbysector/retailandconsumer/9770827/Goliath-vs-Goliath...Amazon-takes-on-Apple-and-Google.html.