Also from same author, on the emergence of AWS EC2 and S3: https://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=194921&cid=15971343 "... not going to set the world on fire." But see (also on front page currently): https://finance.yahoo.com/news/amazon-com-announces-fourth-q... It seems like AWS is doing quite well.
To be fair, the slashdot description of it was a grid computing service, but VMs running on EC2 are not running on a grid in the traditional sense.
I understand the differences, however, the term was being used to describe EC2. In another example, I saw Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos in an interview refer to "grid computing" as a synonym for EC2 when describing it to a naive audience. Indeed the AMA authors comment about "setting the world on fire" was responding to the first announcement of EC2, not a general discussion of grid computing. He chose to use that term, rightly or wrongly, because like Bezos he saw it as synonymous with EC2.