The disk IO problem he mentions might start to go away once SSD drives go into wider use by cloud providers. As far as I can tell, that is his main beef. It's

The disk IO problem he mentions might start to go away once SSD drives go into wider use by cloud providers. As far as I can tell, that is his main beef. It's certainly a reasonable complaint. However the point about pricing is less valid. Cloud hosting providers must invest in lots of extra infrastructure to allow for the flexible provisioning they offer, so any comparison that assumes no need for that flexibility is flawed. Amazon offers spot instances and various other pricing innovations to help align the customer with Amazon's internal provisioning risk. I could see Amazon offering lower prices if the user commits to longer term provisioning. This is a simple pricing update that would likely negate any cost advantages of non-cloud services. The bleeding edge hardware aspect of his argument is valid for some businesses but not likely applicable to most.