Cloudflare has to buy, operate, and maintain huge amounts of servers with lots of hard drives, plus all the fiber/copper connecting them across the planet. Linux and HTML are software. They're only "decentralized" in the sense that they don't physically exist anywhere the way that a cloud provider absolutely must.
Another example would be postgres. I can rent postgres, including whatever hardware is used to power it, from AWS, GCP or Azure. Or anybody really, like DigitalOcean or Heroku.
My 'postgres' code will run on every vendors service. The same applies to containers.
That is how I understood the comment 'Linux and HTML', something that is standard and universal, that affords portability and let's vendors compete on quality rather than relying on vendor lockin.
But is there some fundamental obstacle that prevents most cloud services to be delivered by commodity RFC-compliant vendors? Or maybe some glue software layer, that, once you purchase a license, can abstract away the actual provider and make it simply a price decision?
I understand the providers will fight tooth and nail against commoditization, but once the initial wave of innovation and savage competition has passed, do they have a fundamental tool to prevent it?
Those were concrete improvements for customers. Better products and pricing and convenience vs. the incumbents.
So if new companies can do the same thing to Google and Amazon, all the better.
That said, I remember when I was rooting for Google against Microsoft and Amazom against Walmart. Before my time people rooted for Microsoft against IBM.
Sometimes we want things to become a little more timeless like Linux or HTML where it is democratized and much freer and slower to chamge.