But the executives in charge don’t care. They are all old and wealthy, so the full fallout will not happen until they are gone.
Cloud computing is nothing more than paying rent. Amazon, Microsoft, Google extract rent from corporations. The short term thinking execs love the idea of shedding headcount and shifting infrastructure costs from CapEx to OpEx. Amazon, Microsoft and Google offer free data transfers to load the data owned by corporations into their cloud. Once that data is in, it is expensive to extract.
But the longer term problem is not yet realized. As corporations shed head count of people who know how to support the infrastructure, over time those skill sets will dwindle. The ability to manage complex infrastructures will be captive to the cloud providers.
That is when a modern form of feudalism begins. Corporations will be beholden to these cloud providers, the rents extracted by them will increase and they will have no option but to pay as the job market for skilled infrastructure workers will be gone and consolidated to the cloud providers. The control over the data and infrastructure completely in the hands of the cloud providers, not the corporations that once owned them.
This mistake is greater than the choices made in the 1990s and 2000s to outsource manufacturing to become dependent upon foreign labor. American corporations still owned the data. In the next 10-15 years, they will have lost control of the data to the cloud feudalists. They are actively giving it away now and will only be able to access it through paying rent to these cloud feudalists.
Klaus Schwab said “you will own nothing”… neither will American corporations.