They could just spin up an EC2 instance when someone connects. It's $0.25/hr for a Large (~ 8gb ram, 2/4 core), so if they're servicing someone for a working day (8 hrs), they're out $2. If the user wants to save that working state, they can image the EC2 instance before turning it off (or reassigning it to a different user).
It would also be a nice feature that if you want to do some heavy calculation, you could spin up something more heavy-duty (a high-cpu xl is only 50c/hr). This same workflow with matlab would require you to go and buy faster hardware.
They could do all of that with some kind of standard matlab clone and probably get customers. If on top of that they had some parallelization secret sauce (some way to spin up new ec2 nodes on demand to do calculations), then they've really got quite a product.
It would also be a nice feature that if you want to do some heavy calculation, you could spin up something more heavy-duty (a high-cpu xl is only 50c/hr). This same workflow with matlab would require you to go and buy faster hardware.
They could do all of that with some kind of standard matlab clone and probably get customers. If on top of that they had some parallelization secret sauce (some way to spin up new ec2 nodes on demand to do calculations), then they've really got quite a product.