In the IBM, HP days it wasn’t about paying less per se by threatening to switch providers, it was getting more concessions (of which money might be one). Some big companies had both systems so they could play them off of each other. Time to order more hardware, who will kiss our butts more?

I’d be very surprised if that doesn’t still exist for the big boys. Though most of us are not big boys, and half of the biggest boys are cloud providers themselves.