Programming ability (similar to other STEM abilities) are power-law distributed, rather than Gaussian [1]. From this, it follows that training has very high probability of producing competent programmers but very low probability of producing exception programmers.
I've been using ownCloud for over a year and it works great. The only issue is that it is not as convenient as Dropbox. It needs a server to host it, which is not free; and the server requires maintenance, security patches (see: heartbleed), upgrades, etc.
From the article: "what these two sets of massive reductions show is that companies like Amazon were probably charging far higher for their services than it cost to build and run them"
It absolutely does not show that. What it shows is that these are commodity services with little differentiation, and the only lever is price.
[1] http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1877042813...