Think about 1980s

At that time, users were using terminals from main frames.

Later, PCs boomed.

Recently, people got the idea of using gas/water from utilities companies. Users pay monthly bills without worrying about any technical details.

A year ago, I was working in a big data center for a top 10 company. Costomers were renting both software/hardware resources by paying dues. I was developing software applications to compute the resources each customer was using. The result such as cpu, memory, etc. was used as charging standards.

Cloud computing was similar to 1980s.