[ausudhz]

I don't think this is totally true. The selling point of the cloud it's not only what you mentioned, maybe yes at the beginning.

Today, is more important the time to market. You can use existing services to build your application, there are customers that don't have access to a pool of data scientist to run their own ML training for example. These would rather benefit from high level services that help them to deliver functionalities just by using APIs.

> it becomes far more cost-effective and performance to just manage your own hardware and infrastructure.

This is very wrong too. First of all managing hardware is not just buying a server and placing it in your room. There are plenty of other business functions needed to run an effective datacenter. Procurement, hardware eng, sys admin, security (net, app, etc) and the list goes on.

You can do that if you reach a critical mass or if you are able to attract the right talents for that.

Big enterprise customers will settle for a suboptimal usage of their resources with limited capabilities to expand further or settle for one size fits all. You need a DB? We bought 15mil on Oracle licenses sorry about that, your no SQL needs or your vector search would be better make it work there.

As I said earlier, eventually this affects the time to market. Which is a far more important measure than cost for business. Especially thanks to the agility. If it doesn't work they tear it down, you don't need to keep paying for it.