I agree that long-term, outsourcing of compute capability is probably going to be a negative for everyone. That said, when your organizations point of difference isn't rooted in computing, and you're not a producer of compute platforms yourself, why wouldn't you source that from a third party? The arguments don't look that different to buying pizza boxes from HP, Sun etc - If they could have gouged your profits away I'm sure they would, but as long as the space is commodified competition should be assured, and that sets pricing down at competitive levels, not monopolistic levels.
Far as I can see the only arguments here are that either cloud compute is naturally monopolistic, which seems a stretch, or there's another factor that will lead to ruin here (e.g. long-term connectivity loss between your and your compute in a particularly nasty disaster scenario).
Like, I don't care* if my baker's goals are orthogonal to my own. They just provide crullers for the morning stand up and I can get them from other places despite the insurrection that would occur if staff ever went without. I can likewise not care if my cloud provider's goals are not aligned, because if they screw me I can just shop at another bakery, so speak.
All of this said, outsource to cloud isn't free. You have to have an exit, or at least transition, plan. You have to architect into the configuration, not just transpose what you have. You have to maintain platform-agnostic restorable backups of the information that's critical to your organization, and have an operable proven plan to bring in online. Failure to do these things, which I think is the case for a scary number of organizations that have 'gone cloud', could indeed lead to ruin.
I know this comment is weird. I'm in an odd space here of agreeing with your conclusion but mostly disagreeing with the premises on which you reached it.
*until we see a cloud provider that also owns major fab i.e. if Intel or AMD went into direct cloud provision and took it seriously for about a decade I'm pretty sure it's game and over the world itself would implode from the sheer monopoly that would ensue. Until then, however...
Far as I can see the only arguments here are that either cloud compute is naturally monopolistic, which seems a stretch, or there's another factor that will lead to ruin here (e.g. long-term connectivity loss between your and your compute in a particularly nasty disaster scenario). Like, I don't care* if my baker's goals are orthogonal to my own. They just provide crullers for the morning stand up and I can get them from other places despite the insurrection that would occur if staff ever went without. I can likewise not care if my cloud provider's goals are not aligned, because if they screw me I can just shop at another bakery, so speak.
All of this said, outsource to cloud isn't free. You have to have an exit, or at least transition, plan. You have to architect into the configuration, not just transpose what you have. You have to maintain platform-agnostic restorable backups of the information that's critical to your organization, and have an operable proven plan to bring in online. Failure to do these things, which I think is the case for a scary number of organizations that have 'gone cloud', could indeed lead to ruin.
I know this comment is weird. I'm in an odd space here of agreeing with your conclusion but mostly disagreeing with the premises on which you reached it.
*until we see a cloud provider that also owns major fab i.e. if Intel or AMD went into direct cloud provision and took it seriously for about a decade I'm pretty sure it's game and over the world itself would implode from the sheer monopoly that would ensue. Until then, however...