| I agree with what you’ve said. I’ll even join you in praising plausible, well done! However I still wonder about the TCO of self hosting. For big companies TCO is a number on a spreadsheet. For a technical person it includes total amount of minutes per year net above a hosted solution. The concerns I have about this are: 1). I think it’s extremely easy to underestimate this metric. It’s not just the download or set up or configuration (although if those parts go wrong it could turn from minutes into hours) It’s also the fact that it’s going to have more downtime that you have to fix. You’re going to have to stay current on updates and relevant security issues. You’re going to have to run it somewhere which although light weight takes up some resource. That doesn’t mean the software is not as good. It just means a hosted service has people (supposedly) managing all that crap. 2). Say the TCO is not deceptively low and it really isn’t very much time extra per year. Now let’s decide how much of your time is worth giving up that could be spent on critical path or uniquely value add functionality to your own product or service that could make you more successful? Seriously, what’s the amount of time you’re willing to give up per year on that? I don’t know the exact right answer to number two. All of this is a trade-off right? Not just the TCO but also the control someone else has over you, and the openness and utility of open source. But it’s a concern. If for no other reason than it’s not obvious when a new product comes along. Every minute we have is opportunity cost. The only thing we get to choose is which bucket to put it in. |