I can say with first hand knowledge, yes, US businesses have lost out on international contracts immediately following the leaks. There are plenty of industries (legal ones), in which the realization of government monitoring caused them to change course and keep business local (or at least, significantly shift the amount of information they would trust to a US-hosted business). Doesn't matter if it's irrational or not, real money was lost to US businesses, and I'm sure Amazon would have been party to that (whether they could even distinguish it in their monsterous growth or not, who knows).
It seems oddly short-sighted for SV companies to place blame on the messenger and not, say, the espionage system that created an ecosystem where it's perfectly sensible for people to ask whether their data is actually secure when stored on the servers of companies headquartered in a nation that spies on its own people.
The US could easily have ruled the world in terms of technological sophistication in the cloud services space if the government had been able to keep its sticky fingers off of data that it didn't own. The fact that it couldn't is really the government's fault, not the man that exposed it. A secret this big doesn't stay secret.
> It seems oddly short-sighted for SV companies to place blame on the messenger and not, say, the espionage system that created an ecosystem where it's perfectly sensible for people to ask whether their data is actually secure when stored on the servers of companies headquartered in a nation that spies on its own people.
I don't think it's about blame, it's just that you can't trust US companies with your data anymore.
Do some googling on your own but here's one estimate:
>“It’s clear to every single tech company that this is affecting their bottom line,” said Daniel Castro, a senior analyst at the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, who predicted that the United States cloud computing industry could lose $35 billion by 2016.
Actually, I believe this helped Cisco on the balance, as it delayed many companies on their march to cloud. China's been favoring Huawei equipment for a long time.
