Folks are generally misinterpreting the 'cost' of the cloud by mostly looking at data centre costs, margins etc.. The 'TCO' or 'Total Cost of Ownership' of clo

Folks are generally misinterpreting the 'cost' of the cloud by mostly looking at data centre costs, margins etc.. The 'TCO' or 'Total Cost of Ownership' of cloud services is generally much lower than otherwise. The cloud is valuable because of the variety of features, immediately available, at very large scale, run by very credible people with $0 in capital expenditures. In most cases, it's worth far more than the price, which is why it's so popular. In very, very few cases is it 'cheaper' to run one's own cloud given the massive operational overhead of hiring people with very specialised skills, risks all over the board, the enormous planning, extensive investments. Wallmart must have 1000's of trucks but they don't 'roll their own' delivery vehicles, because there's an inherent degree of specialisation in making vehicles. So yes - in some specific cases it makes sense to 'host': say Dropbox, just wants massive cheap storage, or Google, has special needs & scale & ability, or some entity has very specific privacy requirements - and of course I wish there were more variety in providers, especially localised ... but the cloud is essentially now the default hosting option and that's not going away because it makes a lot of sense. The surpluses generated by such services are vast - it's a big step forward for everyone. Companies using AWS are probably profiting more in surplus than the margins in AWS.