Division of labor and specialization of trade drive it as an optimization of collective deference to a pool of specialized talent at as large scale as possible.

Division of labor and specialization of trade drive it as an optimization of collective deference to a pool of specialized talent at as large scale as possible. There is no need and only excess cost for every company to run 10k or 200k servers themselves more-or-less exactly the same as anyone else would when they can have someone else deduplicate that effort. For example, I work with endpoints instead of servers. That's not seen clearly as a value-add enabler as much as a necessary business expense activity. Gathering larger and larger numbers of similar users is cheaper when the problems are similar enough to be solved fewer times, preferably by someone else and for less money. It's only when the providers charge too much or cannot provide nuanced-, attuned-enough service that customers look to move. It's a utility, like email, that hardly changes once established because the costs of moving can be painful, time-consuming, and expensive.