I was attending the first session of an AWS certification course.  The instructor was giving some examples of AWS tooling and said something that I found surprising.   The gist of the statement was that AWS Lamba + Cloud9 is just like Google Colabs. To be clear – I am not calling out the instructor. I am very happy with the first sessions.  Just as someone who has used Notebooks extensively for analytics, I found the statement absurd.   It was clear that many of the workflows I have used would not operate (well) in the model the instructor was describing.   If the model is writing and testing functions in an interactive way, I can see the correctness of the statement (Real SWEs might disagree with me – this is fine).   If the model is generating analytics from data, I do not see the similarity.  

Instead of this being a tooling question, but had to do with evaluating a business, the instructor would have missed what differentiates Colab from AWS Lambda + Cloud9.  On one dimension they are very similar, while on another dimension they are almost incomparable.  The market and the opportunity would be evaluated differently.   It has me wondering how many places my perspective is leaving me blind to differences that matter.  It also has me wondering how many places my perspective is letting me see what others do not.