Cloning Amazon Is a Dead End, Says Cloud Rival Rackspace

Does the rest of the cloud computing world really need to clone Amazon Web Services in order to succeed?

Probably not, says Lew Moorman, the president of Rackspace, the San Antonio, Texas, company that plays second fiddle to Amazon in the cloud game. According to him, some customers want companies like his to clone all of Amazon’s Application Programming Interfaces, the coding standards that let a program interact with Amazon’s cloud. But he thinks it’s a bad idea that isn’t going to work out.

Companies that try to clone all of Amazon are going to be “always behind, but not quite the same,” he said Wednesday, speaking at the GigaOM Structure conference in San Francisco.