There are competing technologies. But they aren't as user friendly. Most of the technologies that Amazon AWS creates are repackaged open source projects that they make into a managed service. Snowflake is closed source and was built from scratch to fit the cloud. It has a unique blend of column storage with clustering that other databases don't try to do, but works well for the general analytics case. You can do joins across databases, resize your data warehouse with a single SQL statement. And the storage is cheap, but you can ramp up your warehouse in computing power by spending money. So it works with how companies like to spend money. AWS is not a monopoly but has a specific set of features that is difficult to compete with, so I don't think you need to be a monopoly. I'm not going to be buying any SNOW at these levels, but it has the same price to sales as Salesforce, with better growth prospects, so it seems about right in comparison.
