And yet just about any intro-to-programming tutorial gets something running on your local machine, and local machine development continues to be the default for most people, even though devving on a cloud machine is eminently reasonable.
"Pull out credit card, sign up for some thing and pay a bit of money" is a non-trivial bit of friction! Extremely non-trivial!
Especially in a corporate context - you have to get the expense approved. It's not clear if you can put company data onto the machine. Whereas generally running local things on corporate laptops is far less controversial.
"Download this tool and run it." is still an extremely powerful pitch. Pretty much the only thing that beats it is "go to this website which you can use without any signup or payment".
"Pull out credit card, sign up for some thing and pay a bit of money" is a non-trivial bit of friction! Extremely non-trivial!
Especially in a corporate context - you have to get the expense approved. It's not clear if you can put company data onto the machine. Whereas generally running local things on corporate laptops is far less controversial.
"Download this tool and run it." is still an extremely powerful pitch. Pretty much the only thing that beats it is "go to this website which you can use without any signup or payment".