I've spent 35 years in IT operations. I worked Y2K remediation at Allstate, spent 2006-2014 inside Microsoft's cloud delivery organization, contributed to the Microsoft Operations Framework 4.0, and founded (and later exited) Leeward Business Advisors, an Inc. 5000 managed services firm. I have built on, sold, and operated the cloud for most of my career.
A while back I started reading the actual source documents behind cloud economics: 10-Ks, EU Commission decisions, the UK CMA's cloud market investigation, court dockets. Not the press coverage of those documents - the documents themselves.
What I found wasn't a scandal. It was something more interesting and, I think, more useful: a set of perfectly legal, fully disclosed mechanisms that quietly shape what you pay, what you can leave, and what you believe about the cloud. Most practitioners have never read the disclosures because nobody reads a 10-K for fun.
So I made a video series. Twelve parts. Every factual claim is cited to a primary public source. And I want you to try to break it.
The format: facts, allegations, and opinions are labeled
