The common theme with these hardware makers trying to move to cloud infrastructure services is that they all fail primarily because these companies are so poor at software in comparison. People like to say that Apple is bad at services, but they are far, far better at delivering mass-scale services like iMessages and iCloud than HP or surprisingly even Cisco could (forget Webex, they were acquired in and service availability has dropped like a rock when they were industry-leading after Velchamy left for VMware).<p>The fundamentals of cloud services of any kind is that it is a <i>service</i> and that means well-defined continuous operational models with tons of software-defined and enforced methods. This is just not in the DNA of most of the large hardware vendors.