If you lease your mission-critical applications, you are putting your future in the hands of an outside company. Sure hope it does things right. Sure hope it gets things done on time. Sure hope it doesn't lose your data. I think you see my point.
People hate to feed the meter every few minutes.
They don't like the feeling that the clock is ticking in the background. Imagine if you leased your word processor. Every time you took a coffee break, you'd be racking up charges. Tick, tick, tick. There's plenty of potential in the information utility idea.