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There have been a few discussions on here recently about cloud computing, and in particular Microsoft. I don't want to say buy it, or don't buy it, but to make a point about personal knowledge.
I work in software development, mostly using what is known as "The Microsoft Stack". That's .net, C#, SQL Server. Most of my clients host on either Microsoft Azure or on Amazon AWS. Personally, I prefer Azure because there's some nice pipelines, but I can work with both.
So I know a couple of things.
Firstly, you should understand the "moat" of Azure or AWS. Much of what you build is the same for both, but you may use certain slightly different API calls for either. For example, Microsoft have CosmosDB and AWS have DynamoDB that roughly do the same thing. If you want to change from one to the other, there's a bit of work. The other aspect of the moat is that if you want to move from one to the other, or from these to Alibaba Cloud, there's quite a lot of planning and thinking. Even if you avoid what is specific to clouds, that still applies. It's quite an undertaking, but it's certainly not impossible.
The second thing is that a lot of work I've been doing has been about cloud migration. That is to say, companies that owned their own data centres moving to Azure. There's some work involved in that, such as with changing authentication. The reason I mention this is that I think this may have had a considerable effect on cloud growth. I don't know how much, but some. I don't think 20%+ per year can be explained by companies needing more servers because they have more customers. So, something else has to explain it.
Now I can't exactly throw numbers in, but I can see risks that lots of people might not. If that rapid cloud growth is a lot about migration, the tap is going to turn off.
My broader point here is that really knowing a company, the products and markets really helps. When Sun Microsystems was doubling its price in 2000, there were lots of companies already starting a shift from Sun Sparc servers to Red Hat Enterprise Linux. They'd been running pilots and found that it performed just as well, at a much lower price and were starting to migrate. If you worked for Amazon, eBay or knew people around the world of web at the time, you knew this was happening. If you were reading the analysts talking about Sun, or people outside, they were not in the know. To them, Sun was the golden boy powering the internet and was going to be huge.
I think if you're not a customer, employee, or doing a lot of research, you miss a lot.