Again, I’m not saying it’s impossible — only that, say, AWS or GCP have a lot more at risk cutting into a core market pitch and failing to deliver a promised service – and that’s entirely on them to deliver.

In part, this is the different service model: if I go to AWS and buy, say, S3 they have a very clear responsibility not to lose your data and to serve it quickly. If my CIO picks one of the bargain basement outsourcers and the centralized storage service fails badly, each different group will be saying that the failure wasn’t due to them but the company management, outsourced project management, the contractors who set it up/operate/monitor/secure, vendor products, vendor professional staff, Microsoft, etc. Since truckloads of cash will have been spent by then, many of those parties only care if it’ll reach the point of a lawsuit and everyone in the approval chain who didn’t say it was troubled before has an incentive to say the failure was unforeseeable and the solution is not to hold anyone accountable.

Interesting idea, but I don’t think that’s a gamble any of the current clouds would make. The business is by nature a long game, so a few years of increased profit followed by <danger> doesn’t seem like it’d be enticing to a cloud.

Besides, it’s not really true today that clouds only employ “above average” developers. I mean hell, they employed me!

It is already happening. If the most productive and smart people at your company are hindered by processes designed to basically hold them back, they are going to leave no matter how much you pay them.