[riskneutral]

I think the end game is probably something resembling electrical grid markets. Electrical power is bought and sold in real-time by traders, as the supply and load fluctuate. There are many players in a competitive market, like nuclear plants, gas plants, solar, wind, etc. There are even complex derivatives (like “swing options”) traded in the electrical markets. Someday computing resources will be bought and sold in this way too, with a large number of players in a competitive market, which will drive down the currently inflated cloud computing costs. We can already see an embryonic version of such a market in the form of AWS “spot instances” and the AWS reserved instance secondary market. AWS is fighting tooth and nail to avoid or delay such a commoditization of computing utilities, which is why they announce 50 new vendor lock-in software products every week instead of focusing only on the hardware resource.