I kind of thought the "15 years" was just one of those things where people kind of forget what year it is. Wow, 2010 was already over 15 years ago?? That kind of mistake. I think this person was thinking pre-2005. I graduated college just after that, and that's when all this cloud and managed services stuff was just starting to explode. I think it's true that before that, pretty much everyone was maintaining actual servers somewhere. (For instance, I helped out with the physical servers for our CS lab some when I was in college. Most of what we hosted on those would be easier to do on the cloud now, but that wasn't a thing then.)