It's basically pointing out the ping-pong effect that the tech industry tends to go through.

Once upon a time, companies did lots on stuff on big mainframes and minicomputers. These devices were centralized, and you were given what the high priests of Data Processing saw fit go give you.

As PC came to be, computing moved out to the desktop/laptop and away from the big iron. Innovation and chaos commenced. To control the chaos, "servers" emerged. To lower costs and improve services, "clouds" emerged. All of this happened over 25 years.

Enter the "new" client devices -- smartphones/tablets. These devices are increasingly tied to cloud-based APIs and services that are tightly controlled by the vendor providing the service. With cloud IaaS vendors like Amazon, that' ok -- they are offering a commodity. For PaaS vendors like Google or Microsoft or Salesforce.com, it's a bigger deal -- when those vendors decide that some application or API is end of life, you're screwed.

Basically, we're entering a cycle/era similar to the mainframe era that was left behind in the 80's and 90's.

Hello, this article is meant to highlight what makes cloud giants so powerful and why these are not so open ecosystems. The startup that publish this develop an open source personal cloud in Node.js. You can develop and install your own apps on it. Very early stage but quite promising!