Patrick -

I applaud your attempt at trying to draw an analogy between K-Cups and IT purchases. But your conclusions are difficult to accept. Here's why:

1. K-cups are designed for and limited to a single-serving model. Try offering coffee to a party of 10 and you will rapidly create a queue where the 10th person will have to wait 20 minutes before the machine is available. You can temporaily solve this problem by adding
more machines, but the cost (especially if you include space and power) will quickly become
prohibitive. The same is true for "single serving" IT. In some instances the model will
work, but in many (and for those who do the math) it will not.

2. Consumer conditioning to higher prices for substituted products is a well known economic
behavior. But in the IT world, we have all been shown that things get radically cheaper
over time. Since most businesses exist to make a profit, doing things that are inherently
wasteful (economically speaking) like spending $85/month for year for 1 Tb of cloud
storage ($1,020 per year - current Google Cloud storage prices), when the same Tb can be
had in a fixed infrastructure environment for a capital cost of one half of one months rent, will quickly inflate IT's budget.

As pressure from the business to do more things with less money, the "shocklingly high" prices will become unsupportable. So your statement of cloud-services undercutting internal providers may be true for very narrowly defined usage, but overall all it doesn't add up.

3. While I agree that complex, artificially inflated chargeback schemes add little value, to suggest that rapid integration of a cost-is-not-a-factor "single serving" model is the future of IT flies in the face of reality. While it may be a model that works well for small enterprises with limited resources and few employees, it becomes unsustainable for large scale enterprises.

Did the article your wife gave you say anything about the environmental problems K-cups are causing? This falls into the realm of the law of unintended consequences. Applied to IT, one way this would manifest itself is in needing additional labor and technical resources to manage all of the rapid integration points. To me, when combined with a high acquisition cost, this activity adds very little value to the business.

I'm sure there's an appropriate K-Cup/IT analogy out there. But it's not the one you've presented.

- CASEY