I kind of see where you are going with this, but perception may not be as important here as you are suggesting. To address your last 'if' scenario - notice tha

I kind of see where you are going with this, but perception may not be as important here as you are suggesting. To address your last 'if' scenario - notice that Amazon, as a large online retailer, had a compelling reason to offer up the use of the infrastructure they had to build anyway, which was over-provisioned for most of the year. I don't have numbers, but I would be surprised if Google has anything close to the kind of seasonality Amazon experiences. Once it became clear that Amazon was onto something with this whole utility computing/cloud thing, the rest had to play catch up, and continue to do so to this day.