Coming off legacy stuff is complicated for customers. For something like an Oracle database, that software has all the financial information and is all but impossible to leave behind. When Oracle introduced its cloud and fast data analysis products, they were aimed primarily at those virtually locked-in legacy customers.

All that now looks shaky. At its annual customer conference, Amazon on Wednesday introduced new features and services aimed at offering legacy customers on all sorts of computing systems not just easy ways to get off the old technology, but also better and faster ways their old data can work on A.W.S.

Among the most notable, there was a 47-pound data storage device that A.W.S. would ship to a customer, and for $200 would suck down 50 terabytes of data, incidentally converting it from an older system to a more modern one. There was a service called Database Migration, which takes data in proprietary systems and converts their schema to open-source products.

Fun to see my old colleagues and friends at Amazon Web Services continue to move aggressively. Clever ideas here to minimize switching costs for customers on legacy systems.

First AWS was for individual developers, then for startups, then for some large scale technology companies. Now it's going after any company that needs computing. Up (down?) the ladder they go.