Accounting
The following doesn't apply to very small companies, but becomes a huge issue once revenue is beyond a few million annually and for all publicly traded companies.
Once you're past that point, how you book expenses becomes more important than the cost of those expenses. Cloudy services go in the same column as utility bills and facility cleaning staff. Because of modern bookkeeping practices those things don't represent capex or other NRE's like licensing that you want to avoid on your books.
Super simplified, monies spent to actually buy something affect financials in a bad way, even when amortized across many years. But a whole bunch of small sums, even if the total is larger that an outright purchase of the same thing, has a very small effect on financials.
Accounting Macumba means that beyond a certain point it becomes cheaper to spend more money if you spend it in the right way. So, for small companies the 'hidden' costs of Cloudy things can be a killer, but for larger companies it's 'cheaper' for them to pay those costs than to buy things to do it in house. Ultimately, this all means that 'hidden' cloud costs will continue to rise, even if the 'simple costs' continue to go down.
On a lighter note, what this also means is that big array vendors are going to have to develop affordable, high performance products that target the small operations the Cloud providers are starting to ignore. Which is good news for small companies, but it also means I'm going to be able to put EMC kit in absolutely everything and not much would make me happier than telling my EMC rep that I'm using their once mighty arrays to record the drying of paint and the effects of gravity on large rocks for no reason other than it is cheap (we spend about $7m annual with EMC right now, so they are on my 'list of vendors who owe me' :).
Biting the hand that feeds IT
