Jeff, I think the corollary to your point is that if you get a bill for something each month, you're more likely to manage it! Plenty of ways to do dumb things regardless of where the data is hosted.

Absolutely the cloud is a paid service and designed to deliver a profit to whoever is hosting it. Just as in my earlier reply, if we just put this on the menu of options where each has pros and cons, there are times when the cloud will - eventually - make sense. I thinking having a cost associated is healthy for businesses over the long term, and each business can decide to stay local, go cloud, or some sort of hybrid.

Their bet on the cloud is that the economies of scale/automation leave sufficient margin to be interesting to both sides. If we can see some competition in that space then we might wind up with some very interesting pricing options.