Yep! The biggest win for me when AWS came out was that I could self-serve what I needed and put it on a credit card, rather than filing a ticket and waiting some number of days / weeks / months to get a new VM approved and deployed.

I agree - my reference to the 1990s VP of IT was looking at the post, which is about on-premise data centers... not the cloud. I don't think there's a speed advantage for on-premise data centers now vs the 1990s, but if there is let me know. Otherwise, indeed, it's a 1990s-era blast from the past.