Sigh... What a load of tripe...
Hate to put it this way, but the article is just usual tripe we get to hear every time something new and cewl comes along. Just because we are doing the latest coolest thing on earth we for some reason cannot follow any financial discipline and budget requirements. Sorry, I have heard that about agile, web 1.0, wap, J2EE and a whole lot of other things. I keep hearing it about Web 2.0 and now about cloud services at the moment. And to put it bluntly it is a load of bull.
In all cases the actual underlying reason has universally been the fact that developers have no idea how their application scale and are scared to admit it so they start wimpering about open-ended budgets.
OK, to be honest here, a matter of fact, it is not their fault. It is the actual underlying process (it is actually something that is mentioned in every good UML/Unified Process book). Moving to agile has not changed that either.
Neither are cloud services. They can still be run the same way as any IT project as long as there is an idea of how they scale capacitywise. All that is necessary for that is to finally admit that the software development paradigms we got stuck with on behalf of consultants working for Ericsson (UML, OO) and Crysler (Agile) are WRONG. Granted, this will spoil the coke sniffing habit of one consultant too many, but it is the actual place where a software project should start - resource utilisation modelling, benchmarking and scalability constraints. In fact for this Cloud is probably _MORE_ compliant to the IT budgeting process than any other approach.