Keep in mind that without the public cloud, companies and products like Uber, Flipboard, AirBnB, FourSquare, Yelp, SmugMug, Apple iCloud, Pinterest, Shazam, IMDB, and thousands of others wouldn't even exist. These companies either don't want, or can't afford, to run their own global datacenters. Their products only exist because the cloud exists. Netflix runs on the cloud (Amazon AWS). I have a small customer (about 300 employees) that just built out an entire failover datacenter in the cloud (Microsoft Azure). They got a quote for $750,000 from a traditional business continuity provider to build a hosted failover datacenter, which they couldn't even come close to being able to afford, so my customer instead built the entire thing on Microsoft's cloud for an estimated $40,000 - $50,000 per year. The cloud is enabling businesses to have access to massive scale compute and business intelligence systems to help them run their own businesses better, that they would have never in a million years had the financial and personnel capital to build and maintain themselves.
Adobe's cloud runs on top of Amazon's cloud (AWS). Seems strange when you really think about it, but Adobe CC wouldn't exist unless the public cloud already existed. Adobe wants to sell software, they don't want to build a global cloud infrastructure. So they were able to use someone else's cloud as a vehicle to sell their software. NBC used the cloud (Microsoft Azure) to stream all the real-time and on-demand HD streams of the Sochi Olympics. Everytime you used an app on your smartphone, tablet, PC, or laptop to check the schedules, medal count, or watch an event, you were using Microsoft's cloud. It was the largest media streaming system ever built and guess what...it mostly doesn't even exist anymore. Thanks to the cloud they built it all then when the Olympics were over simply turned it all off and walked away. That simply isn't possible without the cloud.
It's not all about the economies of scale driven costs that Manaheim is alluding to either. The cloud creates an equal playing field. 5 person startups now have access to the same compute capacity that a Proctor & Gamble or General Electric do. A good friend of mine is right now launching a startup that performs massive data mining against the buy/sell ratings of stock analysts to predict which analysts will be right and wrong under which scenarios. His startup is 2 people and he's secured a ton of venture capital. His startup only exists because the cloud exists - the IP that he's building runs on Microsoft Azure and leverages its big data and machine learning services. Technology can be a competitive advantage and now, thanks to the cloud, small startups can have access to the same - or better - technology than global enterprises.
A sizeable chunk of the apps on your smartphone only exist because of the cloud. Independent developers are able to build apps that do really cool things thanks to really cheap compute capacity offered by public cloud providers. Get rid of the cloud, and your smartphone becomes a lot less smart.
Threads like this are silly because every single person on this thread that said they don't trust the cloud is already consuming and relying on the cloud in far more ways than they realize. The cloud is embedded into everything and you're all using it and trusting it every single day.