Amazon Web Services created AWS EC2 in order to sell excess compute capacity outside Black Friday peak periods. Gavin Wood (@gavofyork) similarly for metered compute after the Yellow Paper specifying the Ethereum virtual machine pdf 
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> ETHEREUM: A SECURE DECENTRALISED GENERALISED TRANSACTION LEDGER > PETERSBURG VERSION 3e2c089 – 2020-09-05 >DR. GAVIN WOOD >FOUNDER, ETHEREUM & PARITY >GAVIN@PARITY.IO >Abstract. The blockchain paradigm when coupled with cryptographically-secured transactions has demonstrated its utility through a number of projects, with Bitcoin being one of the most notable ones. Each such project can be seen as a simple application on a decentralised, but singleton, compute resource. We can call this paradigm a transactional singleton machine with shared-state. Ethereum implements this paradigm in a generalised manner. Furthermore, it provides a plurality of such resources, each with a distinct state and operating code but able to interact through a message-passing framework with others. > We discuss its design, implementation issues, the opportunities it provides, and the future hurdles we envisage.
The software vendor cognoscenti from Redwood Shores, California to Walldorf, Germany know that enterprise applications pricing is forever disrupted.