It's the old pendulum
After a few years of cloud, the next big marketing thing will probably be 'hyperlocal'. Or some other such buzzword. Because the cloud will be the established thing, the kit-buying bureaucracy will probably have atrophied somewhat, and so there'll be fewer roadblocks in the way of buying hardware. instead the bureaucracy will probably have moved on to lock-in to the existing cloud provider, and resisting moves to anyone else.
Then IT will be able to say, "look how much we can save by bringing this stuff back in-house."
I still love the IT industry use of 'small' business to be anything under 1,000 people. What does that make us? We have 6 people, scattered over one office, 3 houses and whatever car or train our road-warriors happen to occupy at any given moment. For me the options are cloud or do without. I looked with envy at certain IT goodies that only 'small' companies used to be able to afford. Now we can go and rent something cloudy. Even a badly managed cloud service is better than what we can do ourselves. Obviously it's a totally different calculation for larger companies. Or should be.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
