[mmt]

> Going to the cloud is one of those places where they say cost but what they really mean is <networking | servers | power | etc> are _hard_.

But I (and the GP) addressed that. It just isn't hard.

Your earlier comment is closer to the truth:

> political and cognitive effort of doing it themselves

With "traditional" industries, it seems the problem is entirely political, and it actually is about cost, because cloud isn't competing against the commodity gear we've been talking about here. Cloud is competing against "enterprise" hardware, which easily costs even more than cloud, not least of which due to maintenance contracts.

There was some discussion of this (somewhat tangential to the main topic) I participated in here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17329028