> companies that abdicate their informatics operations like this will give their profits to their data-center operators
Is the expectation data centre operators will see margin expansion? (Genuine question.) I had thought data centres were increasingly becoming commoditised.
Yes, a cloud vendor is a company that has literally all of your company's data and a plethora of cloud services that are subtly incompatible with their competitor's offerings, and their machines make the millisecond-by-millisecond decisions about what your company does. They are in a position to calculate precisely how much you can afford to pay them without going bankrupt, and charge you $1 less. Oracle has aspired to this business model for decades, but as you can see from the fact that many of the other Fortune 500 companies still have profits, hasn't been entirely successful.
Yes, running your business on IBM mainframes is a very expensive mistake, for the same reasons; but even IBM mainframes don't have the degree of price-discrimination power that a cloud provider does.
> cloud vendor is a company that has literally all of your company's data and a plethora of cloud services that are subtly incompatible with their competitor's offerings
Balancing vendor lock-in against efficiency is the remit of a half-competent CIO or equivalent. Going cloud doesn’t require using every niche AWS feature.
Is the expectation data centre operators will see margin expansion? (Genuine question.) I had thought data centres were increasingly becoming commoditised.