The cloud is enormously expensive if people are buying it for "compute time".
But that's the miscalculation: thinking people buy cloud for "compute time". By and large they do not. They buy cloud for flexible provision, robust management, easier deployment, and better monitoring.
And those are differentiated qualities.
Even if moving a containerized application across cloud services was as simple as clicking a few buttons, if you're doing any sort of logging, and especially later any computation over those logs, you will be locked in one way or another.
Not sure if this is the original from HBR but it is from 1965: https://hbr.org/1965/11/exploit-the-product-life-cycle
From "Maturity Stage":
> The market maturity stage typically calls for a new kind of emphasis on competing more effectively. The originator is increasingly forced to appeal to the consumer on the basis of price, marginal product differences, or both.
With basically every major tech company (Amazon, Google, Microsoft, IBM) now having some cloud offering and so many companies switching their on-site infrastructure for the cloud, it seems like it's only a matter of time until compute time becomes a commodity. Once that happens pricing becomes a race to the bottom and margins become much smaller.