[tomkarlo]

If you've ever had to deal with the expense and overhead associated with running a business that has extensive production systems, you wouldn't say that. The cloud represents a huge decrease in the initial cost necessary to set up production systems, and it relieves businesses of all kinds of issues regarding long-term leases on equipment or depreciation / amortization of equipment. You don't have to worry about swapping out racks just because they've reached an arbitrary end-of-lease date. You don't have to worry about provisioning hardware months in advance to make sure it's available "if" you need it.

There are definitely hiccups, but I can't imagine many guys running an internet-heavy business going forward are seriously going to say "let's build out our own datacenter rather than solve the issues with the cloud" unless they're doing something really, really, specialized.