AWS and Microsoft are selling much more than cloud services

Ten, twenty years ago customers over at large corporations would often ask me what hardware they’d need to run my software. As software developers, we’d tend to be rather blasé about such questions: “whatever you have lying around!”. If pressed, we’d say you’d need this much RAM and that much storage. We thought we were doing our users a tremendous favor by being so flexible. Yet, customers were very much not happy with our responses.