The only thing the cloud can do cheaper right now is massive amounts of compute power for short periods of time. If you need to do something every month which t

The only thing the cloud can do cheaper right now is massive amounts of compute power for short periods of time. If you need to do something every month which takes 1000 CPU-days, but needs to be done in a day for the results to be of use, you've either got to buy lots of hardware or use the cloud. The ability to do this cost effectively could make certain computations viable, opening up new opportunities for people to do interesting and useful things.