The movement from ownership to renting on the web is absolutely terrifying to me. Within the span of a few years we've gone from owning our technology to renting it out from a big players for monthly fees that we cannot completely predict or control.

The advantages of owning your own hardware will never go away, but soon this will be made quite intentionally impossible as the big players coalesce and continue building their walled gardens.

This is already happening. All the big players own their hardware and rent it out to everyone else, while trying to convince everyone it's not worth owning your own hardware at the same time.

These companies have already begun closing off server platforms by developing custom hardware and software systems that cannot be bought for any price, only rented. These systems represent a new breed of technology with unbreakable vendor lock in.

Theses same companies compete with each other and countless other companies across the space. Take for example a start-up that wants to run their own app store. Google, Amazon, and Microsoft all run app stores. Where will this company go for cloud services? Their only big name options are to host their software on the hardware of a direct competitor. Their host has full visibility on how their system works, and control over the pricing and reliability of their machines.

It's laughable to think their "cloud partner" will give them any chance to compete if they enter the same market.

We've seen UEFI BIOS and un-unlockable mobiles enter the market in droves the last few years. A lot of new PC's can't run anything except windows. A lot of new phones can only run the carrier's version of android. We have all these general purpose CPUs that can no longer run general purpose programs because "security", and a lot of lobbyist pushing to make it actually illegal to run your own software on these with "anti tampering" laws, again for "security" . Soon the big guys (same companies, MS and Google) will make it impossible to run your own software on any reasonably inexpensive devices and the walled market will be complete.

Mark my words, I've never seen an industry with a couple big players where growth and innovation doesn't eventually turn into collusion, higher prices, and market stagnation. Once MS, Google and Amazon have their slice of the pie and they've killed off everyone else, we will see the death of general purpose computers and mobile devices. Everything you buy will be "android computer" "windows computer" and "apple computer". Anything general purpose will be massively more expensive because individual companies can't get the kind of volume discount of the giant behemoths that increasingly control large swaths of the world's computing power. We've already seen the endgame, with Amazon trialing an "on premesis" version of their compute platform which is basically a super locked down server that you can't buy, only rent endlessly. The future of on premesis will be a cloud in a black box if these companies have anything to do with it. Why? Because once they've got you locked in it makes no sense to sell you anything for keeps. Why keep improving their product so you buy the new version when they can just make it incompatible with everything else and force you to rent it forever, for whatever price they feel like charging?

One day running your own servers will be like running your own ISP . Massively impractical because the free market has been manipulated to the point that it effectively no longer exists