There are bunch of reasons, but here’s the one topping my list: 1. Heroes! One man’s hero is another man’s jerk. A single box becomes a single point of failur

There are bunch of reasons, but here’s the one topping my list: 1. Heroes! One man’s hero is another man’s jerk. A single box becomes a single point of failure. Once the hero guy gets pulled out of bed one too many times because the one box is down due to a “simple” change the other “stupid other guy who’s not the real coder” pushed, the hero guy decides they have a duty to protect the tin box with their blood. It gets messy real fast. Soon you get a tin box that no body except our “Hero” can touch. The hero has all the passwords and they decide where the backups are kept (you don’t want the lesser people to mess them up! don’t you?), the hero has the encryption keys, the hero is only person who knows what to do when the tin box goes up in smoke. Any org worth it’s salt does not want that hero guy or their one magic tin box! TL;DR: Organizations are willing to pay for the slow distributed system that costs 10x to run to avoid the real shitty people situation that often comes with a magic all-powerful single machine. (edit: tldr)