Wired spent 13 columns of fine print detailing the birth of Amazon Web Services, Jeff Bezos's scheme to rent out his online store's Web infrastructure to startups. The magazine stayed carefully on message; if you attended Bezos's talk at last Saturday's Startup School, you'll find the story extremely familiar. "You don't generate your own electricity," Bezos asks, rhetorically. "Why generate your own computing?" This is the same line Bezos has been peddling for years. Aside from the rehashed quotes, Wired did squeeze a few numbers out of a reluctant Bezos. The facts about Amazon Web Services, stripped of the hype, amount to roughly 100 words:

Under Jeff Bezos, Amazon has ever played the chameleon, morphing from bookstore to discounter to supermarket. Most recently, it's tried, through the guise of its Amazon Web Services arm, to get people to think of it as a supercomputer to rent. Amazon's earnings were financially solid: The company raked in $1.4 billion in operating cash flow, and by more conventional measures, it earned $207 million on $5.7 billion in revenues. You won't read about that in the blogs, though, because Amazon earned that money the old-fashioned way — by shipping books and other physical goods to customers.