When you switch to the cloud, you might find yourself so thrilled at not having these huge fixed costs anymore, that you might forget a slightly sobering fact: the big cloud providers all report extremely healthy financial results from their cloud businesses. If being a cloud provider is so profitable, then consumers of a cloud provider's services need to be sure that they are not the patsies in the room.
This also gets back to the crucial difference between CAPEX and OPEX. CAPEX, or capital expenditure, refers to a large upfront spend of money used to get an asset (an asset is a resource—for example, a physical server—that will yield benefits over time, not just in the current period) OPEX, or operating expenses, refer to smaller, recurring spends of money for current period benefit:
The suckers in the cloud...