[anonylizard]

For most tech startups, when the growth period hits, its vital there must be NO DELAY to scale. Miss the timing and its permanently gone. If word of mouth leads to a sudden surge of orders, you must be able to supply the good, or you get very angry customers who walk straight into the competitors door.

Most of the value generated by startups is highly concentrated in the few that succeed. So naturally the industry should optimize itself to go big or go home, not penny pinch. That's also, why they hire expensive engineers rather than offshored developers, because speed matters more than cost.

As for non-tech companies. Their demand is more stable in the long run, but they are not tolerant of outages. Amazon cannot have its servers go down during a big sale, too many physical ongoing costs that gets wasted for every second the central nervous system is down. So the cloud is good for its reliability.