Earlier quoted context omitted.
There is no cloud - just other people's computers. Many use-cases just require the job to be done on your computers due to security and privacy reasons. Yes, Amazon's and Google's services are in some ways less secure than your own computer, because they are hosted by companies which are subject to a government that doesn't value privacy, not even of it's own citizens. That means said government can, just to give a c…
Thinking about individual computers will lead you astray. There are, rather, sets of machines (from single boxes to entire data-centers) that are managed by a given sysadmin staff. The more machines they manage, the more likely it is that problems will have institutionalized and operationalized solutions. A cloud is just a sysadmin staff with a Sufficiently Large Deployment to have ironed out all the kinks in their h…
Assuming their business model isn't assuming an infinite supply of future customers so in the short term as long as revenue per customer exceeds cost of sales per customer we're all good, etc. Support costs that exceed average cost of sales must be beaten down/ignored, otherwise its cheaper to let them go and have sales "earn" a replacement customer.
Finally their sysadmins work for them to meet their corporate objectives of various meaningless metrics which have no necessity of aligning in any way with your own corporate objectives.