Buddy of mine worked at a company who was tied to IBM closely. IBM was rolling out its first 'cloud' options and he was so excited to get some on demand type resources.

IBM guys walked him through the process. Then he got an email that it would be a few weeks while IBM installed some more servers in their data center.... he looked closer and realized all his actions on the website was just generating emails to someone else who went and did the thing and emailed them back if they were done or not or had to wait.

Later the process resembled an actual cloud solution, albeit a year or two behind everyone else in terms of features and workflow.