[dragonwriter]

> But if the Cloud is made up of hard drives, then hard drive manufacturers still win.

If drives in the Cloud are, on average, utilized more efficiently (both in terms of less unused drive capacity being purchased, and existing drives being used for more of their design life and not being tossed because the device they are in is end-of-life even if the drive isn't) than traditional locally-deployed (both client and server) drives, then increasing cloud use could mean the manufacturer's still lose (in terms of year-over-year sales) even with total storage increasing, if the increase in average efficiency outpaces the increase in storage, so that annual drive sales drop.