401–405 of 405 posts
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At this point isn't it cost-effective for Lyft to just build its own infrastructure?
Is there a strategic advantage for a shoemaker to make their own hammer?
Sure. If they are paying $100M/y on hammers, it's at least worth running the numbers and investigate alternatives.
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Sounds like OpenStack...
Works for Wikipedia, and they’re in the top 5 of Internet websites.
And management of such organizations might also have ideological tendencies that further skew the calculation.
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Is there a strategic advantage for a shoemaker to make their own hammer?
> Is there a strategic advantage for a shoemaker to make their own hammer? Sure. If they are paying $100M/y on hammers, it's at least worth running the numbers and investigate alternatives.
Strategically, you probably want to focus on what your core competencies are, even if you could in theory do something for cheaper. It's easy to ignore the foregone best alternative of iterating on your own product instead.
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> Businesses don't flagrantly throw around money just to upset people. But businesses do throw around money for the wrong reasons, and keep on doing so if that's the status quo. No one gets fired for buying IBM. > Netflix is doing this too. IBM stuff was bought by a lot of people. > I think we can assume not all of them are just idiots that haven't figured out they could build this themselves. That statement is very…
> But businesses do throw around money for the wrong reasons, and keep on doing so if that's the status quo. No one gets fired for buying IBM. Businesses are wasteful because that's the natural status of a bureaucracy. They aren't throwing away money on infrastructure because they are unaware, they are spending more than they potentially have to because infrastructure isn't their core business. > IBM stuff was bought…
That's not true at all. The "isn't their core business" argument is meaningless and absurd. Any company, big or small, does not want to waste 300M dollars on something they don't need, whether it's their core business or not, particularly when said company is still far from turning a profit.
> That's such a tired argument. Just because they could save money doesn't mean it's a good idea
You are aware you're stating that baseless assertion on a discussion on how a company which is burning through cash and looking for investors is needlessly wasting 300M on infrastructure costs.
> No, the fact that you think this is a "problem" is the problem.
Needlessly spending 300M dollars is a problem in every single business in any corner of the world. I have a hard time understanding how someone can throw around the baseless assertion that this sort of inefficient while operating at this particular scale is not a problem, and pointing out this problem... is the problem? That's crazy.
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I'm actually curious how AWS is able to scale support so well with what seems reasonable quality. I had an issue (my fault in end), got excellent support - and they didn't tell us to take a hike at end when it turned out not AWS fault. Conversely, with GCP 4 years ago now had some support issues - didn't come away impressed - I'm convinced even internally GCP isn't well doc'd or something.
I think it comes down to Amazon vs. Google's company cultures around customer support, which informs attention and resource budgeting. GCP isn't the only Google product where people hate its customer support, and AWS isn't the only Amazon product where people love its customer support.
But what I paid for and got on aws support is so far out of whack there is NO way they made money on my account for that whole year. And the person was actually competant which was a shock. So many "technical support" folks seem like idiots.
Comcast for example, I'd purchased my modem, they started charging a rental fee - I had to call these bozos every month to reverse the charge - a total waste of time. I cancelled finally - I just couldn't take it, and each one lied to me or didn't have a clue. Things like condescendingly saying - you have to pay for the modem.