I sometimes wonder if cloud computing would exist as it exists today without relatively inefficient monoliths that had to scale. Once they'd scaled, the developers could afford to start peeling off the layers, thus only scaling pieces that needed to, leaving them with spare hardware.

"Hey, let's rent this crap," said some guy. And cloud computing was born.

Obviously I have no evidence of this at all, but I do still wonder, since at least two of the common vendors (Amazon and Google) were tech companies before they offered hosting.