I think this quote really hits the nail on the head and confirms what a lot of people may have intuitively known about the value of cloud providers:

  But once certain startups turn into big companies with hundreds of millions of users, with computing needs that they’ve come to intimately understand, it can be far more efficient to set up computing infrastructure designed exactly with those needs in mind.

I think the main advantage of cloud providers is to offset the risk of purchasing equipment that eventually is no longer needed, which is ideal for younger companies that are still trying to reach their market capacity or unsure about whether they'll still be around in a year. Of all the things on a startup's todo list, I can't imagine setting up their own infrastructure is the best way to improve profits or revenue.

But once the constraints of a userbase are more established, it should be easier to migrate off these platforms, since their pricing is optimized for users of all business sizes and use cases, whereas your specific hardware can be optimized for your specific users.

My biggest question is whether cloud providers could achieve a scale where they are able to offer the most optimal infrastructure costs for specific businesses. Maybe this is the case for smaller or mid-size companies, but I'd be interested to see where the inflection point lies.