> Ultimately companies that abdicate their informatics operations like this will give their profits to their data-center operators, who will be empowered to charge them whatever price they want.
This "ultimate" endgame has been predicted since at least 2006 and we've yet to see anything but price decreases on cloud services. Tons of labor has been invested into deliberate cloud agnosticism with no apparent results. I am fully on board with economic arguments that favor data centers over cloud for some organizations. I don't think the capture-and-increase argument holds evidential water or ever will in a competitive environment, and the environment is more competitive than ever.