I disagree with most of your points, but agree somewhat with the non-sold by Amazon nonsense, and the generally poor quality of 3rd party sellers. You have to be very watchful with this. Not using Prime isolates you from this pretty well, as you can easily filter by items available under Prime shipping terms, and 3rd party sellers that put their stuff in the Amazon warehouses to make them Prime eligible avoid the slow shipping problems and are generally not an issue. However, the third party sellers on there are giving them a bad reputation, because people are not distinguishing them from Amazon proper.
I seriously doubt there is any personal retaliation going on.
I don't think they should split the business, as one of the things that makes AWS good is that it has to keep Amazon running. The initial concept of AWS as something that Amazon can use to meet demand peaks, while selling excess capacity makes a lot of sense.
This has the option for a single product from Amazon, or a "2 pack" for a $100 surcharge from some random supplier. This is on MOST products from Amazon and a real pain in the ass to avoid. I hate that Amazon allows this crap which is basically spam. I would be willing to bet that the supplier simply orders 2 of these products from Amazon after the purchase, then ships them out to you and makes $100. It offers zero benefit to Amazon's customers, but it's a rampant issue.
There's also the companies with names such as "Prime inc." which are just trying to trick people.
They probably make the most money off of assistants or employees who are asked to purchase a product and don't really look at the prices or shipping.
Imagine this scenario: I send the link above to one of my family members saying this is the product they need for their doors. They see 2-pack and immediately click it and continue through the checkout process, because I had told them this was the best value product and I had done the research for them.
A query parameter such as (?only_show_amazon=true) would help the issue, or better yet would be a permanent setting, but Amazon doesn't see the problem with allowing these sellers or products. Maybe utilizing the Amazon API and creating a website to avoid this would be a solution.
AWS was never really something to sell excess capacity, thats a myth. And anyway now, it is vastly bigger than Amazon's compute needs. The stockmarket would like it to be sold off, but not sure it will be.
It would be terrifying if AWS was just Amazon's excess capacity, as then one might want to ask what would happen when Amazon suddenly needed the capacity... Apart from for spot instances, a lot of people have never seemed to get that Amazon needs to over-provision massively because of how the product works, and that their customers still need to cover the cost of all that over capacity.
No one said it was "just" Amazon's excess capacity. However, they do use it...so it is way of not paying for their excess capacity, just like everyone else's use is.
I have had excellent experience with Amazon. In reading the reviews of a couple of high end monitors that I am considering, I see that Amazon will give a refund even when the seller will not. I imagine Amazon hammers them back into line.
My only complaint is when they ship by FedEx. In my town FedEx hands packages off to the Post Office, where two day delivery becomes three or four.
I seriously doubt there is any personal retaliation going on.
I don't think they should split the business, as one of the things that makes AWS good is that it has to keep Amazon running. The initial concept of AWS as something that Amazon can use to meet demand peaks, while selling excess capacity makes a lot of sense.