That could be, I was definitely thinking of management hierarchy since that difference has been so striking with AI.

A lot of my awareness started in the academic HPC world which was a bit ahead in needing high capacity of generic resources but it felt like this came from the edges rather than the major IT giants. Companies like IBM, Microsoft, or HP weren’t doing it, and some companies like Oracle or Cisco appeared to thought that infrastructure complexity was part of their lock on enterprise IT departments since places with complex hand run books weren’t quick to switch vendors.

Amazon at the time wasn’t seen as a big tech company - they were where you bought CDs – and companies like Joyent or Rackspace had a lot of mindshare as well before AWS started offering virtual compute in 2006. One big factor in all of this was that x86 virtualization wasn’t cheap until the mid-to-late 2000s so a lot of people weren’t willing to pay high virtualization costs, but without that you’re talking services like Bingodisk or S3 rather than companies migrating compute loads.