[Jochim]

I wonder how much of this is just the industry maturing/specialising. We don't think it's weird that most people don't mill their own flour when they bake bread, so long as the quality of the flour is good enough we're happy for someone else to do it for us.

In the same way most people/companies don't really need to care what hardware their application runs on, only that it meets some bar of quality/cost that's appropriate for them. If someone else is delivering this then you've removed a small department's worth of overhead/planning from your corporate structure.

[angelbar]

If you need to have your baked goods constaltly, you will be better prepared with many flour providers in case of that one provider does NOT LIKE YOUR RECIPE and stop selling the ingredients to you... Or get your own flour mill.

So, not a ideal analogy...

[Jochim]

Pissing off your supplier is something everyone has to be careful of. If you're drawing little swastikas on your cakes while telling everyone how great "Phil's flour" is then don't be surprised when Phil doesn't want to associate himself with you any longer.

The sibling comment pointed out that vendor lock in can be a problem which I agree with, but I think for most of the industry that's a problem of protecting yourself from predatory price hikes/services being deprecated rather than the problem of actively pissing off people you need.

[TheCoelacanth]

The difference is that flour has been completely commoditized, while cloud hosting has only recently started becoming commoditized and isn't all the way there yet.

[rhencke]

I think your underlying point is fair, but I'd like to see you post a more constructive explanation of where it would be useful for the analogy to capture a truth about cloud services that is not true for, say, flour - switching cloud providers is incredibly difficult due to vendor lock-in.