I would guess there are enough overly cautious CIO types out there to support a "big" competitor to Bluemix.

Though, I'm hoping Amazon's announcement for official support for K8S starts a new era where public cloud providers actually compete, and drive down things like ridiculous egress pricing. If the public cloud is affordable, the need for hybrid/private/etc drops down.

I see this from the inside professionally and I’m not surprised by the outcome. Amazon, Microsoft and Google are basically unmatchable. IBM likely survives on incompetent managers paying more to ensure they don’t get fired, but nobody else has that advantage.

Kids, don’t play datacentre at home.

Non elastic, or high egress cost apps are still too expensive to run on public clouds. Or, the transition period, where you're half in/half out, kills you because of overpriced egress.

Unfortunately for the sector I'm in, this is becoming less and less true every few months. Besides, a lot of managers simply don't care, they'll just compensate higher opex with a few redundancies, it doesn't matter - their capex budget goes down, they cash the big bucks, and if apps don't work it's the nerds' fault.