[bsaul]

it's probably going to be just a cycle. Much like energy is very centralized with a lot of custom hardware ( think nuclear power plants) but tends to have decentralized alternatives ( solar panels ) for some advantages, you'll probably end up with the same cycle with computing power. Once a single affordable machine will be able to serve all your applications to all your customers with zero maintenance cost ( because innovation will keep going on), you'll probably switch away from the cloud.

it may be in a long time though..