[axlee]

As a matter of fact, I cannot think of a single industry that can serve a full service to the entirety of their clients at a discrete point in time.

[Intermernet]

Garbage collection. As in the people who pick up your bins. They do this on a weekly basis.

[dragonwriter]

Garbage collectors, like clouds, have usage based pricing, and cannot handle everyone spiking at once. They can handle everyone at normal baseline usage, but that's just like saying a cloud provider can handle everyone using the same number of reserved instances they’ve purchased on a long-term basis.

[tdrgabi]

But if all their customers want their garbage picked up today, or everyday, it won't work.

[dragonwriter]

More relevant to the cloud analogy, if all their customers wanted to purchase a large extra pickup (beyond their normal baseline) on their normal day, which is part of garbage service offerings, they wouldn't be able to accommodate it.

[Intermernet]

Aha, thank you for finding the flaw in my example! I lounge corrected ;-)

[Intermernet]

On any single day, they only have a set list of customers. This is part of the contract.