That's due to a reversal - in the 60's and 70's the iron was expensive and labour was cheap. Today it's the other way around and most organisations don't lease

That's due to a reversal - in the 60's and 70's the iron was expensive and labour was cheap. Today it's the other way around and most organisations don't lease the actual iron, they lease the infrastructure around it - turnkey software solutions, maintenance, scaling, (physical-)security, asset management, etc. - the works. Sure, you could buy a couple of servers for cheap and even including annual upkeep they'd be cheaper than your AWS, GCP, or Azure package. Problem is that you now need an administrator who doesn't have enough work to be a fulltime employee, likely a developer, who also doesn't have enough work to justify a fulltime position, and worst of all your machines are running idle 90% of the time and still the order system collapses when your annual big sale starts... In other words, hardware costs are only part of the equation and it can make a lot of sense to outsource this component.