[jason2323]

I've heard similar arguments several times, and every single time these kinds of arguments go up in flames when costs are brought up. Even discounting the "elasticity" that building applications on the cloud, its simply far cheaper from a cost perspective to build on cloud. Folks fail to mention that the cost of having the kind of all-round support from IBM that you mention comes at a significant cost that is unaffordable to most business. Its probably cheaper to debug esoteric Linux issues than to call in IBM support. In fact, IBM knows this and has moved a significant chunk of their support team abroad to reduce costs and remain affordable. In my experience, these support teams are usually of poorer quality.