the difference between hadoop and another "cloud" company

proud dude at a cloud company points me to some person sitting in the corner having a private conversation who was a coauthor of the c++ stl libraries. OK great, I've used those before. Not now. Building s/w isn't about STL or just which libraries to use anymore. It is about layering s/w on top of each other. Like a file system on top of an operating system in user mode.
They are trying to figure out product direction, always slightly confused. They are good at the lower layers, selling instances. Not so good as being a higher valued platform company with their APIs.