While I agree with your position in principle, I also come from a "legacy IT" world, the kind where systems are moved to public cloud because developers are sev

While I agree with your position in principle, I also come from a "legacy IT" world, the kind where systems are moved to public cloud because developers are several steps ahead of the DC admins, or because the CIO wants all net new dev to be on infrastructure he or she doesn't own. These are not "digital natives" (who have no excuse, imho). These are the thick, long tail or large businesses with aging infrastructure and a lack of willingness -- or ability -- to pay for top talent. An additional point is that even the second tier PaaS/IaaS providers (like GE/Predix, for example) are trying to get out of the DC ownership business. There's no compelling reason for them to keep their own DCs when a) it's expensive to run & keep fresh, b) it's CapEx, and c) it costs them expensive heads to organize and manage everything.