The point is that nobody expected Google to just hike their price for mapping by 1400% overnight. If they can do it with one product, what’s stopping anyone else in a similar dominant market position doing the same?

Culture, and the reputation it earns.

I’m no amazon apologist, but one thing I trust them to do is keep my things running as they are.

And what’s your contingency if they decide that they’re going to hike the price because Jeff’s underwater lair has sprung a leak?

This got downvoted for (I presume) triteness, but there's an important underlying point: Amazon's actions (or anyone else's) don't have to look rational from the outside to really mess up your day.

I’d actually worry more about post bezos Amazon, he’s been running the show for years, it’s predictable- after..

In a world where there are three players, culture and reputation are not worth much, if not only at the beginning. Maybe 5/10/15 years from now the software and competencies to manage bare metal will be only behind the doors of those three companies, and at that point it will be economically convenient for them to act as a cartel and increase prices.

I don't see that happening. As someone who manages bare metal, there's not that much to it besides using a pxe installer. Didn't even use that before we got 20 servers, would just configure IPMI physically the mount the ubuntu ISO via IPMI and manually install the OS at the office.

Ubuntu is actually heavily investing into MAAS (metal as a service) and so is Redhat with cobbler and foreman. So I'm guessing there's enough demand to justify their development (as every major cloud provider uses in house tools AFAIK)