Nearly all irrational pricing like this can be explained by corporate bureaucracy and dysfunction. If you need to provision someone you can buy them a laptop,

Nearly all irrational pricing like this can be explained by corporate bureaucracy and dysfunction. If you need to provision someone you can buy them a laptop, but that's CapEx and has to go through some equipment purchasing bureaucracy that's hell on wheels to deal with. Cloud services are OpEx though and might be something you as an IT person or department head can just approve as long as the monthly cost is low enough. The cumulative cost difference over many months or years doesn't factor into it. A whole lot of the cloud trend can be explained this way. Of course other use cases include temporary employees, testing, external contractors, etc.