Grow the cloud, ignore the rest
You can see the logic for Oracle, Microsoft and the rest, get people into your cloud, and you have their revenue for the very long term. More or less, once you are in, it's very difficult and expensive to get out, and that's not just the direct migration costs.
So what if your software is uncompetitive in the retail market, you can make it very competitive in your cloud, and you have a much lower cost support environment and larger profits. Afterall, who cares about the private clouds, they should be in vendor clouds, and they will represent a very small percentage of the remaining market. Ching.
In the long ran IaaS, PaaS and SaaS will be an inhibitor of technology, because demand will shift towards large hosting companies with risk averse cultures, sure competition will drive it a bit, but will switching your cloud vendor give you much of a business advantage.
You can look forwards to retail sales dropping and becoming more expensive as the market contracts. I'd say the the number of new hosting vendors will drop away, if it hasn't already, because of the high startup costs. Only very large organisations will be able to afford on site IT, the rest will use, what were they called, oh yes Bureaus, comeback Centrefile, the 1960/70s business model returns, without the Mainframes.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
