I completely understand your 90's .com example. A quote I heard last week on twitter from an EX-VMware rep was "After spending a few months in real environments it's very clear to me that Hybrid Cloud is far away for many organisations" and that comes close to your remark about Big Vendor Execs.
Now I have to counter that at least with the following: the market will NEVER be ready for the newest technology and there is nothing bad about that. Because technology always has to be there first for the market to adopt it. The concept of Hybrid Cloud has been around for 2 to 3 years but it's only recently that we have solutions like Azure and VMware vCHS or even some AWS solutions that can truly build that bridge. I mean, how many companies aren't still out there deploying physical servers?