It won't add any feature to the end user, all AWS or any cloud...

It won't add any feature to the end user, all AWS or any cloud DB provides is the ability to scale data operations up and down more readily and cheaply than you could with your own DC setup. I've worked in IT development for 20 years and IMO "the cloud" is actually much more of a hype word than most people realise.

Anyways, I am posting here mainly because I've followed the Xero story for some time now and although I don't ever really post on the forums for stocks I don't own, I have a family of accountants around me so I hear about all this stuff more than I want to.

I think investors should definitely take the Intuit threat seriously. Intuit is very affordable and its feature base is really really good. From what I know, Xero has a tendency to be pricey for functionality that is standard in other packages and because it is not as mature there are a lot of issues still unresolved in the product. That could be related to a slowing down of development to reduce costs in an effort to hit cash flow positive faster but it is a snake eating its own tail situation that a lot of software developers can get to.

TBH I believe Intuit and Xero are the best of the lot based on what I have been told, and will probably steal more market share away from MYOB / Reckon etc so it might come down to a two horse race, but the key question will be "given that all the low lying fruit (easy user converts) have been probably plucked by now by Xero, how much more of the hard-to-get users can they convert in the long term and will that be enough to provide the growth needed to get out of the red before Intuit gains too much traction in Xero's strongest market base (AU/NZ)?"

I really think Xero has a big challenge ahead of them, kudos to investors for backing them. I hope they can pull it off for you