I mean… there’s a simple reason. Running a fuck-off huge data center - let alone a few dozen spread around the world - takes a similarly fuck-off huge amount of capital investment. Doubly so at the beginning, when AWS wasn’t really a thing yet. Only huge companies with a specific interest in hosting compute would be able to do it. Thus: Microsoft, Amazon, and Google are far and away the market leaders. Apple probably could have done it too, but it’s not an area they care about, because their whole business model is about vertical integration, and hosting VMs and baremetal and any number of other things that aren’t locked into osX is antithetical to Apple’s whole thing.

UK government want to see all your data. Is this just a shot across the bows, because it’s comes off incredibly stupid given the context of what a cloud environment provides, i.e. massive amounts of easily accessed very expensive hardware, and there are boutique options out there…

Or maybe they’d like to bring shared computing infrastructure into the hands of the people, nationalised cloud, mmm sounds good!

The vendor technical lock in side is difficult - there is lock in because they have developed a service to differentiate themselves from the competition…

You can reduce the lock in by reducing their feature set to a reduced level - most multi clout implementations basically use containers to do everything I think?