Amazon(s amzn) Web Services announced a new streaming data service called Kinesis on Thursday but one could argue its biggest impact is more business than technology. Google, Microsoft and any cloud provider that thinks it wants to compete with AWS needs to step up its game if it wants to stand a real chance at winning new developers.

New instance types, databases and security protocols are great, but they’re not necessarily huge points of differentiation between clouds. At least not for long. Hypothetically enabling entirely new types of applications because of services that let users capture, store and  transport streaming data to various data stores or processing engines (e.g., DynamoDB, Redshift, Elastic MapReduce and even Storm) is a pretty big point of differentiation.

Forget streaming data — Microsoft(s msft) just rolled out its batch Hadoop service; Google(s goog) doesn’t technically have one for Compute Engine.

While announcing Kinesis onstage at…