> Many a company was stuck with a datacenter unit that was unresponsive to the company's needs
I'd like to +1 here - it's an understated risk if you've got datacenter-scale workloads. But! You can host a lot of compute on a couple racks nowadays, so IMHO it's a problem only if you're too successful and get complacent. In the datacenter, creative destruction is a must and crucially finance must be made to understand this, or they'll give you budget targets which can only mean ossification.
I'd like to +1 here - it's an understated risk if you've got datacenter-scale workloads. But! You can host a lot of compute on a couple racks nowadays, so IMHO it's a problem only if you're too successful and get complacent. In the datacenter, creative destruction is a must and crucially finance must be made to understand this, or they'll give you budget targets which can only mean ossification.